For the first piece that he presented at the renovated and reopened Powell Hall, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin chose a composer he knows well and loves: Leonard Slatkin.

Schubertiade: An Orchestral Fantasy – heard here in its U.S. Premiere – showed Slatkin as a storyteller in a magical realist mode. As Slatkin told a large crowd on Saturday night, he imagined Schubert as a working composer, entertaining musical friends as he was known to do. Slatkin borrowed themes from Schubert’s final sonata and from his unfinished symphony, embellished them with a large, percussion-enriched orchestra, and then imagined what modern composers (such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich) might do with these themes.

There were moments when the textures of all the stringed instr

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