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
priorities together chords
I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
ravel ive-learned masters
I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
ideas house trying
Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.
sound kind visceral
I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
composer very-happy feels
I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
two people different
I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.
people giving focus
Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it's actually exhausting.
done firsts imagine
I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.
letting-go fighting winter
You know, in some ways conducting is counter-intuitive. It's like winter driving in Finland - if you skid, the natural reaction is to fight with the wheel and jam on the brakes, which is the quickest way to get killed. What you have to do is let go, and the car will right itself. It's the same when an orchestra loses its ensemble. You have to resist the temptation to semaphore, and let the orchestra find its own way back to the pulse.
air missing sensual
The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.
barely hall quietly scary seats
The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself.
english-musician
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
music people rite
When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.
certain musician next relates
The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.