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The Musician of The Week

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From the top: Life for Music
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Music Director, Los Angeles Philharmonics

Salonen will compose the IAAF World Championships fanfares. Also coming up an opera to Paris and an orchestral composition to Chicago. The composer/conductor admits that rock has affected to his new music.


The IAAF World Championships in Helsinki start on 6th August 2005. Esa-Pekka Salonen will compose the medal podium fanfares plus a composition of them which will be performed in the end of the opening celebrations.

The composing career of Esa-Pekka Salonen will continue in hectic tempo. He will compose a piece for a tournee of Valeri Gergijev and the World Orchestra (founded by Georg Solti) by August. The time for composing this year is taken for these compositions. Next year Salonen will compose a choir and orchestral piece for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and obviously The Berlin Philharmoniker (conducted by Simon Rattle) will join as a co-subscriber.

And then comes the opera. But not necessarily Peter Hoegs “Woman and Ape” as Salonen had planned earlier. “Everything is in my thinking hat. We are talking about the order placed by the Paris Opera and Gerard Mortier for the season 2009-2010”.

The latest orchestral pieces of Salonen have been recently published on “Wing on Wing” CD by Deutsche Grammophon. They were recorded by the Symphony Orchestra of Finnish Radio in Helsinki. “I am satisfied as the big recording companies do not normally publish composer portrayal recordings.” Even the acoustics of the Helsinki Culture House have been criticized, the Radio Symphony Orchestra sounds fuller than ever. “The recording engineer and the producer were skilful. The recording was mixed from 48 tracks and they digged up details which you cannot hear in the weaker concert halls.”

The next recording for Deutsche Grammophon is planned by the pianist Hélène Grimaud. Salonen will conduct the Piano Concerto of Schumann with the Dresden Staatskapell. “We are also re-designing the recording contract between the Los Angeles Philharmonics and DG in the way which may allow me to announce new DG-recordings soon.”

Salonen hopes soon to make at least another recording of the “Le Sacre du Printemps” particularly in Los Angeles. Instead plans for recording the symphonies of Sibelius are halted. “DG have a fresh Sibelius-cycle with the SO of Gothenburg and Neeme Järvi and they will not have a competing recording”, goes his forecast.

Rock and pop have affected to his recent composings, Salonen tells. “It was that I started from the European afterseriesness where everything was related by negations. Forbidden was many enjoyable things like melodies, modulations, resonance and pulse. Through Rock and living in Los Angeles I found the pulse and confidence to do even simplier things the classical composers still being the most influential to me, though.

The young chauffeurs of Salonen do play Foo Fighters and The Tool to him but his own modular language is something else. Rock works often by Schubertian song modulars when on our side the modulars are an open question which has to be thought and decided every time, Salonen compares.

Listeners of Salonen are also found through internet. The bonus piece of their record have occasionally been the most down-loaded classical recording in the U.S. “It was nice to see how it was downloaded by partially the same people that also downloaded the Medúlla of Björk and film music by Waxman”.

The eternal problem is the lack of time for composing as the conductor-Salonen takes so much of his time. Now they are working on a visit to Cologne and the series of performances of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as the new directions of Peter Sellars at the Paris Opera in April. “My feelings now are that after the Los Angeles position will end, as the earliest propable 2008, I will not anymore take a leading conductor positions to have more time for composing”, Salonen thinks.

What next?

Esa-Pekka Salonen will return to Finland in the end of June. He will conduct Anders Hillborg and Magnus Lindberg at the Porvoon Suvisoitto on 30th June and 1st July.
http://www.musicfinland.com/classical/avanti/suvisoitto/summersounds.html

In August he will conduct in opening ceremonies of the Helsinki IAAF World Championships,
http://www.helsinki2005.fi/index.php?&Lang=eng
continuing to the Baltic Festivities of Stockholm.
http://www.sr.se/berwaldhallen/Baltic/index.stm

Which Esa-Pekka Salonen (a co-founder) is creating for bigger than ever. This year the Festival broadens from Stockholm also to Helsinki and Tallinn. Salonen will conduct Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in Helsinki and Tallinn and the SO of Swedish Radio in Stockholm. Also the Mariinski theatre from St. Petersburg and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra will take part.

In the Helsinki Festival
http://www.helsinginjuhlaviikot.fi/english/index.html
Salonen will conduct at least the closing concert in the 4th September. The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra will give the first performance for Mark-Anthony Turnagen’s trumpet concerto with Håkan Hardenberger as the soloist. Salonen will bring the orchestra to BBC Proms Festival in London where they will perform additionally Ravel and Sibelius.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/


Salonen will again return to Helsinki in September for the third international Jean Sibelius Composer’s Competition. He will act as the chairman of the jury and as the artistic director of the competition. Salonen has invited conductors Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Oliver Knussen to the jury as well as the former M.D. of L.A. Philharmonics, Mr. Ernest Fleischmann.


The Los Angeles Philharmonics:
http://www.laphil.com/home.cfm


Translated & links added by Oz
From the text of Vesa Sirén in Helsingin Sanomat magazine


Please feel free to continue by another texts on musicians!!
 
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Wing on Wing, Esa-Pekka Salonen
Deutsche Grammophon CD 477 5375

Our time entirely is sounding in the maximalist composings

The full sound of the RSO mesmerizes on the new CD of compositions of Salonen.



Listening to this new CD composed by the composings of the recent years by Esa-Pekka Salonen is a crazy driving experience. For many reasons. When time goes by, finally the words of the (teaching) fathers and the truths of the (learning) sons will meet!

The aesthetics of Einojuhani Rautavaara was not with too high esteem in the modernistic 80s of ours. But now Esa-Pekka Salonen, after experiencing everything, can proclaim: The idea of freedom showed by the teacher, not understood then by Salonen, feels now the one and only correct principle.

Well, it should not allow to take too much attention. Salonen have taken his freedom by going through the different techniques of composing, getting thoroughly into the secrets of orchestra.

And he is now Mahler of our time. The maximalist of music to whom nothing is strange or unnecessary. He will cultivate anything with his virtuoso ability to overtake of huge machinery. There is often vast masses in the music but it is never rough and always outlined and outstandingly componed.

As often he is able to calm it all down and compose deliciously chamber music wise. Salonen takes elements to his music from many directions. You can feel the western tradition of concert music starting from Bruckner and before all, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Respighi, Klami and why not, Ligeti.

Sometimes you get an impression like Salonen’s music was continual answering to the challenges given by Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. From there additional paths start to spread the same way like from Platon’s writings to the philosophers. But listener will also recognize his own time from Salonen’s music.

His compositions bridge ethnic, even some of the Finnish folk music, rock and minimalism to concert music, often taken as difficult. Salonen does it such a way giving an opportunity for a common man to have again some new meeting points to finer music. The compositions of Salonen dance in beautiful rock-tempos and sophisticatedly de-touched rhythms producing ecstatic accelerations, culminations and outbursts.

A techno- or night club person can easily get into Salonen’s moods. Also Salonen’s way to create synthesis with scifi-, hype- and machine cultures bring the music with confident strength to our time. It becomes part of our time. The union between human, machine and nature with Salonen is shocking.

It is not about depressed denial of the modern times. It is more like a positive feeling of life which must have been born under the Californian sun. In the latest composition of the CD, Wing on Wing (2004) different elements, voice of a fish, speech of Frank O. Gehry, siren singing of Anu and Piia Komsi and the orchestral part combine so beautifully that you can believe into possibility of happiness.

In some parts the composition reaches sinking oriental floatingness, the cyclicity of time, while it in the same time, as whole, feels like a higher degree superorganism or humanmachine.

Insomnia (2002), the main composition of the record, will surprise around the middle by near folk music like shades of violin in it’s closing part nearly never-ending rhythm of riding. The music offers a skilfully arranged creative process where the natural growth associates to, who else than Sibelius himself.

The opening composition Foreign Bodies (2001) is a joyful package of sparkling orchestral inventions. The best pieces from the libraries of the orchestral literature of the 20th century picked up in gourmet style by Salonen. This piece is thoroughly refreshing, playful and creative colour-game. Again, the way how the pieces of the mosaic will seat next to each other and between and how the 3-part composition’s parts slip into others is unforgedly Sibelian.

You will also be offered some wonderful values of beauty throughout the composition: As well as in the side theme of the opening Body Language as in sound texture of the second part Language and in the shadowy magical and minimalistically soft rhythms of the flutes in the closing part Dance. Before the wild gets loose.

The addition of the electric bass is not a cheap or proposing disco effect but a perceiving and exciting, reinforcing sound factor supporting the lower area of the symphony orchestra. It melts into the wholeness with rare coherence. RSO has never felt this good on a record. I even had to check from the cover that they really play in this recording. The sound is so mesmerizing as well in it’s fullness as in the richness of the finished details.

The first appearance of Esa-Pekka Salonen and RSO on the DG creates hopes for continuum of their co-operation.

http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/special/?ID=salonen-wingonwing

Translated & link added by Oz
From the text of Veijo Murtomäki in Helsingin Sanomat magazine
 


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