Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Finnish composer-conductor, has been named to three posts in Paris and Los Angeles. One of them is conventional: music director of Orchestre de Paris. The other two are more futuristic.
Last year, Salonen made waves when he cut short his tenure at the San Francisco Symphony, after its board, citing financial constraints, scrapped his plans for less traditional approaches to the orchestra’s programming and presentation.
Now, he will become “creative director” of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was music director from 1992 to 2009, and “creative and innovation chair” of the Philharmonie de Paris, the arts complex that houses Orchestre de Paris and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the contemporary music group founded by Pierre Boulez. The Philharmonie was designed to be a venue for varied music, theater and dance events, and its campus has educational and exhibition spaces.
LA’s Disney Hall, built during Salonen’s tenure at the philharmonic, is also a space designed for more than conventional symphony concerts.
“Salonen’s broad mandate will be to think beyond conventional concert formats and bring together different disciplines,” The New York Times’ Joshua Barone writes. “Rather than take on another music director position, he has worked with institutions in Los Angeles and Paris to create new jobs that challenge the role of, and maybe even the need for, a traditional maestro.”
“I think every orchestra on the planet should really take a good look at the model as we know it,” Salonen told Barone. “Is this something that can be modified or even abandoned, or something maybe not in sync with the rest of the world? I don’t know. But this kind of deal I’m entering is good because both places have the space to explore what the answer would be.”
Barone’s Times article:
The job description of a “traditional” conductor – one who devises, prepares and leads concert programs, selects (and purges) the orchestra’s roster of players, and serves as the public face of the ensemble – is a product of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, when orchestras became free-standing entities, rather than the pit bands of opera houses and the musical establishments of monarchs and clerics.
Instead of being the Kapellmeister, a supervisory servant, the chief cook and housekeeper of music, the conductor became the maestro, the commander of musicians. Some were despots, tormenting players in rehearsals, firing them at will. Others were more paternalistic or seemingly more collegial. However they behaved, they were absolutely in charge.
Typically beginning their working lives as pianists or orchestral musicians, they viewed the conductor’s role as re-creative. Few of the star maestros of the past, from Artur Nikisch and Arturo Toscanini to Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti, spent much time promoting or working collaboratively with composers. (Some were composers themselves, but rarely very good at it; a handful were accomplished arrangers.) Essentially, they were curators, presenting sonic exhibitions of masterpieces from the past.
A few were also curators of the present: Willem Mengelberg in Amsterdam, Serge Koussevitzky in Paris and Boston, Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia, Thomas Beecham in London, Otto Klemperer in Berlin and Los Angeles, worked with, even financially supported, contemporary composers. Still, like their less venturesome colleagues, they were commanders-on-high to the musicians they led and demigods to their audiences.
The new model of the maestro was introduced in the 1950s, in the person and persona of Leonard Bernstein. A composer of popular theatrical music (and far less popular concert music, to his frustration), Bernstein was a camera-friendly and gifted mass communicator; he could talk about music as capably as he could perform it. His musical interests crossed old boundaries between classical and popular, past and present. In concerts and on television, he persuaded audiences to journey beyond Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.
Not much beyond Ives and Copland, though. Bernstein was a promoter of the recent past, not the present and future, of classical music. As with older maestros (classical musicians in general, really), his idea of a contemporary musical language was fixed in his student and early professional years – in Bernstein’s case, the 1930s and ’40s. More recent compositional styles discomfited or repelled him.
Salonen is the avatar of a new new-model maestro, equally celebrated as a composer and a conductor, a promoter not just of new music but also new ways of presenting classical music. He is open to experimentation, exploration of cross-currents of music and other art forms, not wedded to orchestral performance as a wholly abstract sound experience.
He comes from a nation, Finland, that takes classical music seriously but doesn’t fixate on its past or treat its performance like a ritual. Finnish composers, from Sibelius onward, have been national celebrities and leading cultural exports. And unlike other countries that afford such prominence to musicians, Finland is a democracy. Artists may have to cope with the bureaucratic meddling that comes with state subsidy (as Salonen almost certainly will in Paris), but they don’t fear being censored or ostracized.
Salonen’s work in Paris and Los Angeles is likely to produce both how-to and how-not-to models of the 21st-century orchestra and the performances it stages. He has found willing sponsors with deep pockets to support his efforts. He is media-savvy. He has the talent and working experience to get it right, and the curiosity to let “it” take many forms.
If classical music has a future beyond being a museum or archive, Salonen is the most prominent, probably the most capable, conductor to chart that future.
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