Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was appointed music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 2018, has announced his departure from the post at the end of the 2024-25 season. In a statement, Salonen said, “I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.”
The Finnish conductor and composer, whose tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1992-2009) was marked by innovative programming and commissions for dozens of new works, had similarly ambitious plans in San Francisco.
The orchestra’s board and management, however, decided to cut back the concert schedule, reduce the number of commissions for new music, and “to make unspecified shifts in programming to drive revenues,” The New York Times’ Javier C. Hernández reports.
The retrenchment is due to “significant financial pressures on the organization that have become impossible to ignore,” Matthew Spivey, the San Francisco Symphony’s chief executive, told Hernández:
Letter V 