Remember the disastrous 2010 Traviata at the Met, “conducted” by Leonard Slatkin on the opening night (before folding his tent and skedaddling), the one Village Blitherer Brian Kellow admitted he neither heard nor saw, but why did Anthony Tommasini have to be such an old meanie, etc. etc.? 

Well, it turns out you remember wrong. Mr. Slatkin has now written a book that explains that even though he admitted on his own blog he didn’t really know the score (“…this is an opera I had never conducted and the first real repertoire standard for me at the Met. But after a while, I concluded that since everyone else in the house knew it, I would learn a great deal from the masters”) he in fact knew the score perfectly and only thing that went wrong was that he was targeted for (per Norman Lebrecht‘s scurrilous précis of Slatkin’s argument) “collusion between certain writers on the Times and a colourful opera blogger.”

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