Esa-Pekka Salonen
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Esa-Pekka Salonen: ; born June 30, 1958) is a Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is currently Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, Conductor Laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Composer-In-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, and Artistic Director and cofounder of the Baltic Sea Festival...
NationalityFinnish
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth30 June 1958
CountryFinland
suits riding bikers
There was this kind of mildly annoying mythology about conductor Like biker should riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, and wearing a sort of a leather suit.
war hero world
Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.
thinking play guy
If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.
world classical-music certain
Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.
classic moments term
I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.
art drama years
We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.
artist creating today
When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.
guy would-be levels
It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.
thinking research information
If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.
writing years two
Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.
thinking would-be composing
I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.
giving energy kind
There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.
lessons conducting i-realized
I started conducting lessons and I realized that this is actually something I like doing.
real stuff musician
I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.