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
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.
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.
journey order years
If somebody had told me when I was starting composition in Helsinki in the '70s that I would end up in L.A. and to describe that journey, those 17 years with the philharmonic and building the hall and this and that, I would have said, "This is a fairy tale of the first order."
years creative trying
I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.
years pleasure i-can
After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
play differences years
In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
based experience modern odds performance visual
If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.
functions los people
Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.
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.
continuity form
This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.
competition coins position
If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.