It was this project - The Names Project - that moved the American composer John Corigliano to pen one

It was this project - "The Names Project" - that moved the American composer John Corigliano to pen one of the most widely performed contemporary works of recent times: his Symphony No 1. A choral offshoot of that work - Of Rage and Remembrance (a reshaping of the symphony's third movement, "Giulio's Song") - serves as a moving preface to the symphony itself on Slatkin's first RCA recording with his new orchestra. The final pages, where members of the chorus who have lost friends remember them, chanting their names, is a devastating revision of John Cage's "chance" technique: the names change with each performance.Neither the choice of repertoire nor the timing of this release leave one in any doubt as to where Slatkin chooses to nail his "primary colours". Next year he takes the Corigliano Symphony to 10 major American cities as part of his first national tour with the NSO. Doubtless there'll be those who'll question that choice, but all the more reason for it. Another of his upcoming projects (one that follows on from this summer's Proms appearance, when he brought Harlem to Kensington) is a disc devoted to the music of Duke Ellington - "an African American composer from Washington DC". You reach out into a community via the repertoire you choose to play, he says.And when you leave home to venture abroad, you take a little of home with you If the promoters will let you.

The repertoire list for next year's international tour contains only two European works: Sibelius's Second Symphony and the Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto. For the rest, it's William Schuman's Fifth Symphony, Walter Piston's Second, Copland's Third, the William Bolcom Piano Concerto, and a new Percussion Concerto (for Evelyn Glennie) by Joseph Schwantner. Smaller pieces by Ives, Gershwin and Arthur Foote complete the roster.But Slatkin is wagering now that promoters - particularly in Germany - will be pressing for an Ives/Beethoven/ Sibelius package. "If I had my druthers," he says, "I'd go with Ives/Schwantner/ Copland 3 for London." So if that's not what we get, you'll know why. Incidentally, if I had my "druthers", Slatkin would be principal conductor (not just, as is soon to be confirmed, principal guest conductor) of our own Philharmonia. Here's a man who's not afraid to say he'd rather conduct first-rate American pieces than second-rate European ones.

I feel much the same about conductors.Anyway, back to touring "Look, it works the other way around, too. When your orchestras come to the US, we don't hear them play British music because our promoters don't want it! And yet the Berlin Philharmonic can play Brahms wherever they go... Ask yourself why it is that the Proms are so adventurous and successful? It's not just the prices, is it? It's trust." One hundred years' worth And subsidy.Which is where the BBC comes into its own. Tomorrow Slatkin presides over a major UK premiere that only the BBC - in the present climate - could have made possible. William Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and of Experience is the rich picking of a lifelong fascination - some would say obsession - with the visionary writings and philosophies of the English poet, painter and engraver, William Blake. Bolcom calls it "A Musical Illumination of the Poems of William Blake" and its creation occupied him, at varying levels of intensity, over a period of some 26 years."Without Contraries is no progression," wrote Blake, and it's those "contraries" that dominate both the "songs" and their "settings" in this huge, all- embracing cantata. Just as Blake used his whole culture, past and present, high-flown and vernacular - from classical verse to street-song and doggerel - as sources for his many poetic styles, so too does Bolcom.

The English madrigal sits cheek by jowl here with the American bar-room ballad, blues and soul, jazz and gospel rekindle their natural kinship, serialism rules without tyranny, the dissonant rubs shoulders with the sweetly consonant. So a gloomy song about the poor and underprivileged finds expression in gritty contemporary rock - unforgiving electric guitar to the fore - while "The Shepherd" is carefree American bucolic, western-style. Town and country, inner-city frowns and Arcadian smiles, misery and mirth. Contraries, conflicts and contradictions, different musics spilling into each other until finally a kind of universal harmony is culled from disharmony A mad, glorious, inglorious, synthesis. A universal song.Bolcom knows a thing or two about song, songsters, songfulness. He and his wife Joan Morris (who has sung in all but one performance of Innocence and Experience and does so again tomorrow night) were prime movers in the ragtime revival of the Sixties, and together they have toured and recorded compendious programmes drawn from two centuries of American song So nothing here is parodistic. The unforgettable, Shaker-like "To mercy, pity, peace, and love" ("The Divine Image") has been touched with Stephen Foster's kindly hand, a wrong note here and there tempering innocent harmonies with the pain of experience.So there you have it: innocence and experience The fundamentals of human nature Blake recognised that.

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It was this project - The Names Project - that moved the American composer John Corigliano to pen one

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