Leonard Slatkin ended an extraordinarily successful 28-year run with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra over the weekend. Now he will set his sights on taking the helm of the National Symphony Orchestra.

On some levels, this would seem the best of times for the classical record business.

The first heat wave of the season, oily and leaden, settled upon Missouri this past weekend as Leonard Slatkin led his final concerts as music director of the St. Louis Symphony.

Exactly how many programs Slatkin has conducted here in the past 28 years -- from his fresh-out-of-Juilliard apprenticeship through his 17-year tenure as music director -- remains something of a mystery.

"I'm sorry, we just couldn't come up with a reliable answer for you," a St. Louis Symphony spokeswoman admitted. "When we tried to count up all the different things Leonard has done -- children's shows, new-music programs, community concerts, stepping in to conduct at the last minute, and so on -- it really got confusing."

"How about premieres?" she asked brightly. "I can tell you exactly how many premieres he's led."

That figure is indeed impressive -- 62 world premieres or first American performances, almost half of them original commissions -- but not so impressive as what cannot be quantified: Slatkin's sheer ubiquity in St. Louis over the past quarter-century. Here, in addition to his podium duties, Slatkin has hosted his own local radio and television programs, thrown out the first ball at Cardinals games, driven along most of the back roads in the city and county. The proprietors know him by name in the fanciest downtown restaurants and at the frozen-custard stands in the suburbs; he seems equally comfortable on either turf.

Unlike such Olympian music directors as Sir Georg Solti (who, during his last few seasons in Chicago, was required to be in town for only about 12 weeks of the year) or Zubin Mehta (who rarely passed up an opportunity to make a negative comment about New York City, even when its Philharmonic was paying him pretty close to a million-dollar salary), Slatkin has actually lived in his adopted city throughout his tenure and he has taken an active part in its day-to-day life.

Slatkin holding a baseball bat in Japan with his wife, soprano Linda Hohenfeld, and St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith during a Far East tour in 1986.

As such, he is known and esteemed by many St. Louisans who ordinarily couldn't care less about classical music. Particularly within the past decade and a half, Slatkin has become a veritable symbol of the city, which has responded by cheering on the accomplishments of the orchestra the way other cities might cheer on their football teams. Now Slatkin is leaving town -- to take the helm of Washington's National Symphony Orchestra this fall -- and a party was in order. The farewell concert yesterday summed up many of Slatkin's achievements; the mood was both celebratory and bittersweet, and the weather obliged with a foretaste of the inimitable summer torpor to come. After so many years in Missouri, the Washington summer should hold no terrors.

St. Louis Blues

St. Louis is a paradoxical place. Once away from the tourist attractions, the restored downtown, the Mississippi River and the gigantic, gleaming Gateway Arch, a visitor feels rather as if he has fallen into a Dreiser novel or Steichen photograph. From certain vantage points, the city seems made up of nothing but brick, smokestacks, freight yards and faded advertising; old hotels and department stores stand shuttered, oddly eloquent, imbued with a grimy but unmistakable poetry.

At the corner of Seventh and Locust streets, the Ambassador Theater, an elaborate 1926 vaudeville palace, had recently taken a fatal but not yet conclusive hit from a wrecking ball. The Locust Street wall had been demolished and a passing spectator could look inside to the ruined auditorium. Strands of what looked like metal confetti strung with concrete dangled from the old painted proscenium, flanked by smashed-in terra-cotta cherubs. It must have been beautiful once.

A similar fate almost befell what is now Powell Symphony Hall, the St. Louis Symphony's first permanent home. Originally known as the St. Louis Theater (and built in 1925 by the same firm that created the Ambassador), Powell Hall is located on Grand Boulevard, in what is called the "midtown area," a mix of rubble and renovation located halfway between downtown St. Louis and the tidy, affluent bohemia of the Central West End. The orchestra bought the crumbling theater for $ 500,000 and then spent another $ 2 million or so fixing it up. Money well spent, for Powell Hall is a jewel -- a marvelous cream-colored old house with warmly responsive acoustics and an inviting elegance.

A few minutes after 2 on Saturday afternoon, just following an open rehearsal of his gala final concert, Slatkin sat at a table in the mirrored lobby of Powell Hall and met his fans.

Leonard Slatkin makes his way to the stage for the final time as conductor of the St. Louis Symphony.

Most of them asked for autographs -- on program books, ticket stubs, cocktail napkins and even, in one case, on a tablecloth. Some folks wanted their pictures taken with him (one young woman in tight jeans all but jumped into his lap just before the flash went off) while others merely came by to pay their respects.

Half an hour and roughly 75 signatures later, as the hall was being emptied to prepare for an imminent high school graduation ceremony, the head stagehand approached Slatkin hesitantly to say goodbye. "Hey, you don't get out of here without a hug," Slatkin said, as he walked around the table and threw his arms around him. "It's been a long time, buddy."

Two in Harmony

It is hard to think of another conductor who has intertwined his destiny with an artistic institution so completely that the two may be said to have grown up together. Some might make this argument for Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, or James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera. But the Philharmonic and the Met were venerated, world-class organizations long before Bernstein and Levine were born. The St. Louis Symphony, on the other hand, was a solid, respectable orchestra of the second rank when the baby-faced, untested Slatkin signed on as an assistant conductor in 1968 and pretty much the same when he became music director in 1979.

What happened thereafter, however, was decidedly out of the ordinary. By 1984 or so, the Slatkin-St. Louis pairing had managed to combine two distinct -- and usually incompatible -- objectives: winning over the critics and music professionals with sophisticated, adventuresome programming while building a fervent following with local subscribers and donors, whose tastes tend to be deeply conservative. Suddenly, the St. Louis Symphony was as at home in the late 20th century as it was in the 19th, as comfortable with the music of large American cities as it was with the music of Austrian villages. And it played virtually everything with vigor, clarity, luster, virtuosity and style.

Slatkin has never been a radical. Indeed, he has been highly pragmatic in his choice of 20th-century works -- too pragmatic for some avant-garde tastes. He paid little attention to the music of such hyper-modernists as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Milton Babbitt. He cared neither for the abstract, aggressive chromaticism of Elliott Carter (although he conducted a memorable performance of the "Symphony of Three Orchestras") nor the austere, determinedly reductive minimalism of Philip Glass (although he has led works by three other leading figures in this movement -- Steve Reich, Terry Riley and John Adams.

Instead, he championed a middle ground, mostly composers whose works clearly reflected their origins in the 20th century, but who had never lost a nurturing connection with the traditions from which they grew. And he helped inspire a reevaluation of our own musical past, exploring works by the once-derided "American conservatives" -- composers such as Samuel Barber, Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston and William Schuman.

The farewell gala, which took place yesterday afternoon, was pure Slatkin. It was devoted in large part to 20th-century American music -- Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," Gershwin's "An American in Paris," and six especially commissioned riffs on the theme by Paganini that had already inspired variations by Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Lutoslawski, among others. From 19th-century Europe, there was the overture to Schubert's "Rosamunde" (the first work Slatkin ever conducted with the St. Louis Symphony) and the Beethoven Choral Fantasy. Many of the guest artists had long associations with Slatkin; one of them, soprano Linda Hohenfeld, is his wife.

About 30 musicians who performed that seminal "Rosamunde" Overture with Slatkin in 1968 were still in the orchestra to play it with him yesterday. Pianist Jeffrey Siegel, an old Juilliard pal, played the solo part in the Choral Fantasy with a massive, clangorous tone; the chorus was superbly prepared by Amy Kaiser. Hohenfeld sang the Barber work sweetly, idiomatically, with a rapt lyricism that was well maintained by the orchestra.

All four of the composers who have been "in residence" with the St. Louis Symphony since 1982 -- Joseph Schwantner, Joan Tower, Donald Erb and Claude Baker -- contributed to the ad hoc "Yet Another Set of Variations (on a Theme of Paganini)." So did William Bolcom, from whom the orchestra has commissioned three works, including the sumptuous Symphony No. 4. Finally, Slatkin added a variation of his own.

The contrasts were instructive. Schwantner provided a big, brassy fanfare, with lots of color and some Reichian ostinato passages for mallet instruments. Tower's entry was all swirls and trills, conveying a palpable aura of mystery. Bolcom offered a bright explosion for brass, winds, piano and percussion that popped and flared out in less than a minute. Baker scored his variation entirely for strings; out of an array of tone clusters emerged little fragments of melody to give the listener steady footing. Erb began with Paganini's theme (scored for bass fiddles) and then swerved unexpectedly into Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony -- appropriate for the occasion. Slatkin's own variation paid tribute to all of these composers, with teasing references to some of their other works -- an in joke, to be sure, but it was not necessary to recognize these allusions to enjoy the piece.

Then there were songs and tributes. One that likely meant a great deal to Slatkin was a presentation from Jack Buck, a sportscaster on KMOX who is known as the "Voice of the Cardinals." Slatkin was given what is known as an "away" jacket -- a Cardinals jacket for team members to wear when away from home.

The program closed with "An American in Paris," Gershwin's brash, breezy romp, in which the New World meets the Old and both rather enjoy the encounter. Slatkin is at home with syncopated symphonic jazz, something that can be said for only a few conductors of his eminence.

Finally, the music stopped and, after a shouting, stomping, standing ovation, the Slatkin era was at an end. The conductor returned to his dressing room, with its newly bare walls and crated scores, mementos, photographs and scrapbooks, all set to be shipped to a new office in the Kennedy Center. He planned to take a 9:15 flight to Washington last night.

"I think it would be much harder if I stuck around all night," he said on Saturday. "I just wanted to have one last good time this weekend -- no tearful farewells. Although it was pretty hard to say goodbye to the orchestra. When we had our last private moments together, I told them all how much I loved them, how much I was going to miss them, how much I believed in the future of the St. Louis Symphony. And then, just for fun, I asked whether anybody did a really good imitation of me, because I know musicians always do impressions of their conductors when he's not looking. And so one person stood up and did one. And it was pretty good, if I say so myself.

"You know, it was really the orchestra that made its own success," he said. "I was just the conduit, just somebody in the right place. It was ripe to happen. And Hans Vonk has a spectacular orchestra to work with."

Vonk begins his first term as music director of the St. Louis Symphony this fall. The board of directors decided, probably wisely, not to seek out a "Leonard II" to take Slatkin's place; Vonk, European-born and trained, is admired among musicians for his searching and meticulous interpretations, but his principal interest would seem to be the meat and potatoes of the standard repertory.

Philip Kennicott, music critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, suggested that the city accept the change of command with equanimity. "If there is a lesson in the Slatkin years," he wrote in yesterday's paper, "it is that the St. Louis audience has a base-level toleration for the new and challenging. All of that suggests that the audience Vonk inherits from Slatkin will give him the benefit of the doubt, approach him with an open mind and . . . wait patiently until he has created a new relationship with and elicited new sounds from his orchestra."

A point well taken. Still, one hopes that Vonk will continue to infuse the middle- and late-20th century into the orchestra's repertory, especially now that the 21st century is only five years off.

And the audience may be finally ready to listen. On Saturday afternoon, an affable, conservatively dressed, identifiably Midwestern, seventyish couple approached Slatkin for an autograph. The man was content to stand back and smile as Slatkin signed his program booklet, but the woman had an unexpected compliment.

"Oh, Mr. Slatkin, we've been subscribers ever since you started here," she said. "We just love the new music, and we're so glad you introduced us to it."

Slatkin grinned -- the wide, satisfied grin of a man who had accomplished a cherished objective. "Thank you," he said. "We had a good time, didn't we?"