Daniel Slatkin is an internationally recognized, award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist. He inhabits the worlds of film, television and classical music equally, evoking vivid imagery through his work. His musical style is best described as classic orchestral, with modern touches. His scores often feature piano, guitars and synthesizers performed and recorded by himself.​

 

Slatkin's orchestral concert work has seen two world premieres for the 2024/25 season. "Voyager 130" received its world premiere with the National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin, Ireland. A 14-minute piece for full orchestra, it musically describes the journeys of the Voyager spacecrafts using material from the program's Golden Record, most prominently Beethoven's 13th String Quartet (Opus 130), beginning at the launchpad and ending at the edge of our solar system.

 

Slatkin himself conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for his second world premiere of the season, "Grand Slam Fanfare", which featured an appearance by St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame shortstop, Ozzie Smith. An epic orchestral celebration of baseball, the piece references classic stadium organ vamps, and concludes with a crack of the bat, performed by a baseball bat custom-built and designed for the work. His first concert work, "In Fields", commissioned and premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, was recorded by the Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra and released on Naxos Records.

​

​​As for his film music, Slatkin has scored multiple emotionally-driven projects for ESPN, most recently the brass- and electric guitar-focused score for "Left Hand Man" on Sunday NFL Countdown, about Kansas City Chiefs coach Porter Ellett, and "Awaken: The Morgan Hoffmann Story" for SportsCenter Featured, featuring a soaring live string orchestra to aid in telling golfer Morgan Hoffmann's inspiring story about his battle with muscular dystrophy. He also conducted the strings of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in their concert hall for his dark, gritty score to “Gradually, Then Suddenly: The Bankruptcy of Detroit,” a feature documentary which received the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film.

​

He is currently scoring Boys To Fame, a feature-length documentary about Philadelphia Eagles Hall of Fame wide receiver Tommy McDonald, and legendary Philadelphia sports columnist Ray Didinger.