A Southern California state of mind

Salonen reflects on leaving LA

Departing LA Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen (left) and his replacement, Gustavo Dudamel. (Fred prouser/reuters/file 2007)

LOS ANGELES - Immediately after conducting the last Los Angeles Philharmonic concert of the 2007-08 season in June, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen took off for Stockholm, where the Swedish Radio Orchestra celebrated his 50th birthday with an affectionately screwball gala. Next he visited his country home in his native Finland, where he composes and recharges. In August, he went to the Finnish capital to conduct at the Helsinki Festival, which he once headed, and then back to Stockholm to do the same at the Baltic Sea Festival, which he started six years ago to increase awareness of environmental issues through music. That was followed by his Vienna Philharmonic debut at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.

A major figure in Scandinavia, a conductor and composer in demand throughout the world who keeps homes in London, Finland, and Los Angeles, Salonen arrived at a casual cafe here in a T-shirt, cargo shorts, sandals, and sunglasses. He was eager to sit outside and soak up some sun.

"From the point of view of language," he said in his accented but sophisticated English, "Finland is home. But in every other way, LA is. Two of my kids were born here, and I have to say we have had a very good life here."

Come April, Salonen will relinquish one of his LA residences. He's staying in Brentwood, where he lives with his English-born wife and three children, but he is giving up his artistic home at Walt Disney Concert Hall. His 17th season as Philharmonic music director, which began earlier this month, will be his last. For all the anticipation over the young Venezuelan superstar Gustavo Dudamel, who will take over a year from now, this will be a bittersweet season at the symphony.

The appointment of Salonen was a gamble. He was seen by some as flashy, cold, analytical, inexperienced in the standard repertory. The traditional Philharmonic audience fretted about the amount of new music suddenly on the programs. And once the Hollywood celebrity machine got wind of a sexy young conductor, there was no telling where that could lead.

"I thought that the biggest risk for me would be to be sucked into this celebrity culture," Salonen admitted, "so I might have been a little too severe in the beginning.

"But there were some really annoying moments, like when 'The Tonight Show' sent a talent scout to my concerts. She had never been to a classical music concert in her life and looked it. So I never appeared on Johnny Carson." Nor would he entertain a request from People magazine to be included on its list of the 50 sexiest people on the planet.

As things turned out, a good deal of Salonen's West Coast education was as a composer. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he still liked to consider himself a composer-conductor, but the truth was that he had stopped writing music.

"The obvious and easy explanation for me to give to people when they were asking why there hadn't been any new pieces for a while was that I had been conducting so much, I had no time," he said. "But that was only half the explanation."

As a European Modernist, Salonen said, he had been inculcated with negatives, such as to avoid melody, harmonic identity, and rhythmic pulse. Secretly, though, he was attracted to the music of John Adams, who was then dismissed overseas as being simplistic.

"Only after a couple of years here did I begin to see that the European canon I blindly accepted was not the only truth," he said. "Over here, I was able to think about this rule that forbids melody. It's madness. Madness!"

Without the European musical elite looking over his shoulder, Salonen began to feel that it was fine to have his own ideas. "My focus moved from an ideological principle to a pleasure principle" is how he described the composition of his breakthrough piece, "LA Variations," which the Philharmonic premiered in 1997.

Although a work of great intricacy and virtuosity that doesn't ignore Salonen's Modernist training, "LA Variations" builds on rhythmic innovations closer to Adams. The piece proved an immediate hit, so much so that Salonen was stunned by the reaction and then by the score's continuing success - it has been taken up by several other conductors and had more than 80 performances worldwide.

" 'LA Variations' was meant as a completely local thing," he explained. "A local guy - a new local guy, but a local guy nevertheless - writing a piece for the local band for the local audience. That was the deal."

Frank Gehry's landmark Disney Hall, completed five years ago, also inspired Salonen to take chances, to make his boldest attempts to create that cohesive unity within a modern orchestra that he set out to achieve, serving both tradition and the present.

Salonen won't be around in November 2009 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his Philharmonic debut. "I'm going to give it a short break. I think that it's important for Gustavo to get going without the old guy hanging around too much and all that."

Still, he said he was in discussions with Philharmonic president Deborah Borda about projects he might undertake in Los Angeles. Opera, too, will play a larger role in his career, now that he will have more time for it.

Next season, he will conduct Janacek's "House of the Dead" at the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala. He recently started working as music director of the Philharmonia in London, but his responsibilities will not be nearly so great as they've been in Los Angeles. He will concentrate on special events and festivals.

Perhaps it's a gloomy Scandinavian thing - turning 50 is known in the region as "the little death" - but Salonen, who still looks younger than his age and conducts with the energy of a young man, talks a lot about getting old. He mentions wanting to conduct Wagner's "Parsifal" and write his long-planned opera based on Peter Hoeg's novel "The Woman and the Ape" while he still has time. He said he turned down a tempting offer to conduct Wagner's "Ring" cycle at the composer's theater in Bayreuth, Germany, because life is too short for such a commitment.

He's even become amusingly self-deprecatory about his supposed lost youth. "I have to say that if today People magazine wanted to include me as one the 50 most beautiful people on the planet," he said with a laugh, "I would have a totally different point of view at 50 than I had at 32. I'd be totally willing to negotiate."