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
suspects
Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
aversion deep-down cerebral
I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.
training culture asking
Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed.
play differences years
In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
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.