Salonen, Esa-Pekka

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares189 Views

    Esa-Pekka Salonen: A Conductor at the Top, and at a Crossroads

    by

    Salonen, who will soon be a free agent for the first time in decades, could do pretty much anything at this stage. What will it be?On a late afternoon in May, pop and classical music luminaries gathered in the neo-Gothic sanctuary of a 19th-century church-turned-Soho House in Stockholm. With drinks in hand, they listened as the media personality Cilla Benkö asked Esa-Pekka Salonen, “So what’s going on in your head at the moment?”“Well, I’m at a crossroads,” said Salonen, the composer and conductor, who is a year away from becoming a free agent for the first time in decades. “I’m kind of figuring out what to do, if anything.”Salonen is in a good position to choose what comes next. He is a conductor at the top of his field, and the kind of composer who can bring on not just one high-profile commissioner but several for each new piece he writes. The day after his interview with Benkö, he received the Polar Music Prize, an honor that has been called the Nobel Prize of music, directly from the hands of the Swedish king.Salonen, center, rehearsing with the San Francisco Symphony in 2022. The announcement that he would leave when his contract is up in 2025 came as a surprise.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesThe award is given to a classical and a pop artist annually; Salonen’s counterpart was Nile Rodgers, the mind behind songs like “We Are Family” and “Le Freak” and albums by Madonna, David Bowie and Beyoncé. Guests at the ceremony included the royal family, the megaproducer Max Martin and a member of ABBA, all gathered for a televised evening of tributes and black-tie diners dancing in the aisles to music related to the prize winners.With royalty grooving to Daft Punk but also listening attentively to Salonen’s “Concert Étude for Solo Horn,” it was a fitting celebration for Salonen, one of the most open-minded, open-eared and fundamentally cool artists in classical music, who at 66 is beloved and respected across the field.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Discord at the Symphony: Losing a Star, San Francisco Weighs Its Future

      by

      The struggles of one of the nation’s finest orchestras show the difficulties facing classical music in the United States.For a night at the symphony, there was a lot of tension in the air.As concertgoers filed in to Davies Symphony Hall earlier this month, they were greeted by players from the San Francisco Symphony passing out bright yellow fliers accusing management of having “no clear artistic vision.” Then, shortly before the performance began, a shout echoed from one of the balconies, exhorting people to “Act!”It was the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first concert in the hall since March, when he stunned the classical music world by announcing that he would step down as the orchestra’s music director amid a dispute with management over budget cuts. The evening’s program was just the sort of thing he had promised when he was hired with a mandate to rethink the concert experience: Ravel’s charming “Mother Goose” brought to life by dancers from Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, and then Schoenberg’s nightmarish “Erwartung” staged by the director Peter Sellars.His decision to leave once his contract is up next year has upset fans — “Who he is and what he brings can’t be replicated,” Mark Malaspina, an audience member, lamented as he entered the hall — and left some concerned about the future of the 113-year-old San Francisco Symphony.“An orchestra that was in very good shape is now in crisis,” said Peter Pastreich, a longtime arts administrator who managed the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999. “It is heartbreaking to watch.”Salonen’s unexpectedly short tenure in San Francisco is in some ways a very local story, but it also says something about the challenges facing classical music in 21st century America. Even before the pandemic, many orchestras around the country were struggling. Audiences were aging and shrinking. Costs were rising. Old business models were withering. And philanthropy, which has replaced ticket sales as the main source of income for most orchestras, was becoming increasingly hard to come by.When San Francisco landed Salonen, it was hailed as a coup.The orchestra enjoyed a reputation for musicianship and innovation and had a relatively large endowment. But it also had been running deficits, losing subscribers and seeing its donor base diminish. Salonen — a pathbreaking, charismatic conductor and composer from Finland who had previously led the Los Angeles Philharmonic — was seen as someone who could capture the imaginations of new audiences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Conductor Surprises by Embracing the Ordinary

      by

      Esa-Pekka Salonen is known for unusual, ambitious projects. But at the New York Philharmonic this week, he succeeded with standard repertory works.The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen tends to get noticed for his ambitious, even outlandish projects.Perfume cannons puffing out scent alongside the music. A rare performance of one of the piano’s most gargantuan concertos. Contemporary opera in the concert hall. A roboticist being included among his artistic collaborators. Ample helpings of his own works. (Salonen is the rare maestro who is also a successful composer.)But once all the perfume has dissipated, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Salonen, who led the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, is, at core, simply an excellent conductor.The Philharmonic program was unusual for him in that it was so, well, uncreative. No premieres, no stagings, no intriguing juxtapositions. Just two classic pieces — Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” — that, in the style of old-fashioned orchestra programming, seemed to have been thrown together arbitrarily. And yet it was a terrific concert, overseen by Salonen with his characteristic fiery clarity.Fiery clarity is a good way of describing his most recent career move, too. Classical music is, outwardly at least, meticulously polite. Few musicians leave positions amid publicly verbalized anger.But in March, when Salonen announced he wouldn’t renew his contract as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, he told the truth — or at least his truth. He had made his decision, he said, “because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.”By the industry’s standards, this was an expletive-ridden rant. It quickly became clear that the problem was money. The San Francisco Symphony has hobbled out of the pandemic even more deficit-laden than it was before; its expensive promises to Salonen — like that team of artistic collaborators, roboticist and all — were going to need to be curtailed.The funny thing about Wednesday’s concert in New York is that it was exactly the kind of program that would be his future had Salonen chosen to remain in San Francisco: meat and potatoes repertoire, without the fancy trimmings.But even without them, the Philharmonic played beautifully for him on Wednesday. The Shostakovich concerto was dotted with eerily mellow rips of brass near the start, a hushed dusk in the strings at the start of the second movement and characterful pierces from the winds in the final Allegro. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soloist, played with a rich yet focused tone, and he didn’t indulge in excessive emotion. This resulted in a performance that was modest, straight-faced and fundamentally serene — but also a little cool, a little efficient. The piece seemed to sail by briskly.It was hard to remember the concerto at all after the monster that is Berlioz’s “Symphonie.” Last year, I wrote that the Philharmonic’s rendition of this score under Herbert Blomstedt was “leisurely, mellow, thoroughly pastoral.” That could hardly have been further from Salonen’s neurotically unsettled, icy-hot take, which grabbed every opportunity to emphasize off-kilter rhythms and changeable textures.The opening “Reveries, Passions” section had a dewy freshness to the sound that could shift, in a moment, to intense fullness, and then back again. Salonen couldn’t keep the long central “Scene in the Fields” section from feeling like it lingers. But it had quietly been building tension, with an undercurrent of anxiety — an anticipation of the trembling violas a little later on — even in Ryan Roberts’s quiet, plangent English horn shepherd calls.Salonen embraced the sudden swerves and floodlit brashness of the “March to the Scaffold,” which was, as it is too rarely, genuinely scary. And the finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” was raucous but never messy — a ferocious, fantastic party.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Esa-Pekka Salonen to Leave San Francisco Symphony

      by

      Esa-Pekka Salonen, the ensemble’s music director, said that he no longer shared the same goals as the administration, which has been cutting costs.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 2020, announced on Thursday that he would step down when his contract expires next year, citing differences with the orchestra’s board.Salonen, 65, a groundbreaking conductor who has promoted new music and experimented with virtual reality and artificial intelligence, said he no longer saw a path forward.“I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does,” he said in a statement. “I am sincerely looking forward to the many exciting programs we have planned for my final season as music director, and am proud to continue working with the world-class musicians of the San Francisco Symphony.”Disputes between maestros and management rarely break into public view, and this split is notable because of Salonen’s stature: A revered conductor and composer, he has been a leading force in efforts to redefine the modern symphony orchestra. In San Francisco, he appointed a team of what he called “collaborative partners” from a variety of genres, and he oversaw a steady stream of premieres.The rift between Salonen and the board appeared to be over efforts to cut costs, which include reducing the number of concerts and commissions, as well as putting tours on hold. The orchestra is also seeking to make unspecified shifts in programming to drive revenues. That approach raised broader questions about whether Salonen could achieve his expansive vision for the orchestra. (Salonen declined to comment for this article.)Matthew Spivey, the San Francisco Symphony’s chief executive, said in an interview that the orchestra had different challenges and priorities than when Salonen was named the orchestra’s music director in 2018. The pandemic exacerbated longstanding budget woes, he said, and there were “significant financial pressures on the organization that have become impossible to ignore.” He said the orchestra would need to “evolve in various ways to respond to those pressures.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Cartier’s Perfumer Creates Scents for ‘Prometheus’ Music

      by

      Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s perfumer, has created a scent poem that enhances the experience of Scriabin’s synesthetic score for “Prometheus.”It was time to smell Scriabin’s “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire.”This music, from 1910, has an element of synesthesia in its score, which calls for a color organ — a keyboard instrument that projects lights of a dozen hues — along with a full orchestra, a piano soloist and a choir. But in October at Davies Symphony Hall, the home of the San Francisco Symphony, the piece was being prepared with an additional sense in mind.A group had gathered in the auditorium to test an almost unheard-of idea: that a performance could be accompanied by something like an olfactory poem, a narrative series of perfumes released through diffusers between seats and a set of futuristic cannons, called vortexes, that were developed for this occasion to shoot out rings of scented smoke.Onstage, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet practiced his solo part in “Prometheus,” which the San Francisco Symphony will perform March 1 through 3, while the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen listened attentively to the wooden vortexes as they were being tested; the sound they made while emitting smoke, he noticed, was nearly a G.Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s longtime perfumer, who had designed the scents, double-checked notes on her iPad. For this day’s test, without the orchestra, she wanted to be sure the diffusers were timed to match the music. So they were going to play a recording overhead.They had settled on one that Claudio Abbado made with the Berlin Philharmonic and the pianist Martha Argerich in the 1990s. After the Breton engineers who had designed and assembled the vortexes told everyone to take their seats, the “Prometheus” team quieted down, and waited.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      How California Became America’s Contemporary Music Capital

      by

      On the eve of a sprawling new festival, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel and others recount how the state reinvigorated classical music.Nobody will be able to take in the entire California Festival, a statewide series of classical music events spanning 650 miles with such density that some nights will have 10 or more performances happening at once.The festival, Nov. 3 -19, was conceived by the music directors of the state’s three largest orchestras: Esa-Pekka Salonen of the San Francisco Symphony, Gustavo Dudamel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony. But it grew to contain nearly 100 partnering organizations, who are presenting a host of world premieres and programs of contemporary music under the festival’s banner.It’s an overdue pat on the back for a state that has long encouraged new music, providing freedom and a sense of possibility that has made it the center of gravity for composers who work with a spirit of innovation, a long list that includes Harry Partch, Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros in the past, and Terry Riley and John Adams today.Much has centered around distinct communities in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. “Those of us who make music in San Francisco,” wrote Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the city’s orchestra’s for 25 years, “are blessed with an audience that comes to the concert hall more to discover the world than to escape it.” That was one reason he championed what he called American mavericks.Further south, Los Angeles became a microcosm of the California spirit, with sky-high ambition and musical curiosity that was cultivated by power players like the commission-happy philanthropist Betty Freeman and the strong-willed Philharmonic leader Ernest Fleischmann. And Dudamel brought pop-star power to the orchestra before, in a jolt to the city, he announced this year that he would leave for the New York Philharmonic in 2026.Ara Guzelimian, who grew up in Los Angeles and now leads the Ojai Music Festival nearby, described California’s classical music culture as “the lingering positive presence of the pioneers heading West and looking to escape a kind of conformity” before adding: “That’s sort of romanticized, but I think the reality is that a lot of good work has been done by individuals and institutions to develop that.”Here are edited interviews with some of those people, who shared their ideas about the diffuse histories and beliefs that brought about the California Festival.Far From EuropeMATTHEW SPIVEY (chief executive of the San Francisco Symphony) This goes back to the émigré composers, what Stravinsky and Schoenberg were doing in Los Angeles. You have this European tradition that felt like it was being evolved into a new, American version.ARA GUZELIMIAN The East Coast has historically been weighed down by facing the Atlantic and Europe. But here, there hasn’t been the same glare of the spotlight of everything having this kind of weight of being on the record. So, there’s just been a lot more freedom to experiment and move away from any sense of orthodoxy.JOHN ADAMS (composer who lives in Berkeley) When I arrived, there was a far out community mostly centered around Mills College [in Oakland]. Robert Ashley was the guru. There was a lingering scene of academia composers, sort of the last echoes of the Schoenberg-Sessions influence. But at the same time, there was this very romantic myth about San Francisco, and when I got there, I felt it was very open and gave me the freedom to experiment, which I just didn’t feel in the East.From left, Rafael Payare, Gustavo Dudamel and Michael Tilson Thomas.A Hungry AudienceMARTHA GILMER (chief executive of the San Diego Symphony) People are always looking for the next and the new, so it is a canvas in which to create.JEREMY GEFFEN (executive and artistic director of Cal Performances) This is an enormous state. There’s a whole part of life outside the metropolitan areas, which is what attracted Lou Harrison and others. And there are smaller orchestras that are just as adventurous, because that is the standard.GUZELIMIAN As a teenager, I saw Julius Eastman not in some isolated, alternative venue, but with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. I saw Stravinsky at a concert of “Les Noces.” I saw Lawrence Morton’s Monday Evening Concerts. And I saw Xenakis because that was a completely normal thing to do. Here’s the great secret of arts management: Organizations create their own audience expectations. You can’t blame a so-called conservative audience.Why CaliforniaGUZELIMIAN I’ve rarely experienced the arts here as having a critical mass as they do in New York City, in which randomly on a subway or walking down the sidewalk you overhear people talking about an opera they’ve seen, or a play, or whatever show at MoMA that’s “unmissable.” That has incredible virtues, but in a funny way it can create a constraint. Whereas on the West Coast, it’s not as pervasive, not as self-conscious. So, there’s room for an imaginative venture to kind of make a go of it. Now, L.A. is bursting with new music groups and series, and to me the height of that spirit in New York is more historical. It doesn’t feel that its bursting at the seams.ADAMS I was really struggling, because back East [he grew up and was educated in New England] there was enormous prestige granted to the sort of Elliott Carter brand of composition back in the ’70s, and I had absolutely no interest in it. But the composers I knew of in California gave me more of a sense of freedom and permission to experiment.ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Many composers came here to find themselves, to find their language. And, as opposed to the East Coast and Europe, there has never been a sense of mainstream modernism, of what new music should be.The Bay AreaDEBORAH BORDA (longtime chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who worked earlier with the San Francisco Symphony) I got to the San Francisco Symphony when I was 27 [in the mid-1970s], and there was almost no contemporary music. But then came Edo de Waart, and he was really a devotee of new music. We brought John Adams, who was doing New and Unusual Music concerts, we brought in Diamanda Galás, you name it. We did a lot of Louis Andriessen music, like “De Staat.” Sometimes the audiences would boo and hiss his music, but he would come out and laugh in his ripped jeans.ADAMS There was a lot of talk about a West Coast aesthetic, and I suppose that included composers like Daniel Lentz and Terry Riley, and for sure Lou Harrison. I made my own synthesizer, which was a really West Coast thing at the time, and I think the person that did most creatively was Ingram Marshall. He made this amazing amalgam of Balinese influences and these wonderful rich drones and himself singing at what we called performance sites, which were usually just someone’s garage; we didn’t have the term “pop-up.”PAMELA Z (composer and performer) I moved to San Francisco in 1984, and I distinctly remember being excited by the broad range of new music and performance scenes. There were all these different factions: the improvisers, the instrument-builders, the avant-garde contemporary music, people who were doing performance art and people who were doing live performance with electronics, like Diamanda Galás. I was interested in all those different scenes, and I wanted them to be in the same room with each other. I started doing these events called Z Programs, that were almost like an avant-garde variety show. And when Michael Tilson Thomas was at the San Francisco Symphony, he was always interested in opening up things more. So there were connective tissues across the city.From left, Claire Chase, the Rady Shell in San Diego and the composer John Adams.San DiegoCLAIRE CHASE (flutist) I grew up in north San Diego County, and went to public schools where there was no music program. A lot of my musical education happened instead at the San Diego Youth Symphony, which is, I think, a really important cultural organization. It has this storied and really progressive history. California is this maze of contradictions. It has this D.I.Y. fervor — and I don’t mean in the corporate, Silicon Valley co-opting of that word — that gave birth to and sustains every artistic organization: Asian Improv Arts, the Tape Music Center and Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley’s “In C” being a totally D.I.Y. concert.I have these beautiful memories of Pauline barefoot with her accordion embodying this you-can-be-whatever-you-want-to-be feeling that’s so typically Californian and beautiful and true. She was this queer iconoclast doing her thing but also community building.GILMER When I was going to move out here, someone told me, “Whatever you can dream, it’s possible.” I really think that’s true. I don’t know where else I could have opened the Rady Shell [an open-air stage on the San Diego Bay] and started a hall renovation within five years.RAFAEL PAYARE And anyone can see us at the Shell because it’s outside in the park. We are rehearsing, and there’s someone walking their dog.Building in Los AngelesSALONEN When I did my debut with the L.A. Philharmonic [in 1984], I’d never been to this country. They put me up in the Biltmore, which in those days had a suite with a grand piano. I tried to go for a walk, and the doorman said, “Shall I call you cab?” I said I’d just stroll around a bit, and he said, “I don’t recommend that.” Anyway, there was an older cellist who came up to me after the second rehearsal and said, “Welcome to your new home.” I started coming back every season, and when André Previn stepped down, there was this letter from the board that modestly said they would like to develop the L.A. Phil into the world’s best orchestra, would I like to be a part of that process?One morning much later, when I was living in Santa Monica, I got up really early, and my kids were still asleep. I sat in the kitchen, made myself a coffee and thought, What is this weird feeling? And I realized: I’m happy. I feel free, not straight-jacketed by some kind of European, dusty modernist discourse.BORDA There was a real community around music in Los Angeles. In the audience you’d see composers. You’d see Annie Philbin, who runs the Hammer Museum. You’d see politicians.SALONEN Somebody who has to be mentioned in all this is Betty Freeman [who died in 2009 and was an influential donor behind the Los Angeles music scene]. She was quite spiky. She would call me and say: “I heard your new chamber piece. Utter rubbish. Would you like to come over for dinner?” But she did commission quite a lot of stuff, and was behind the scenes supporting composers when they fell on hard times.THOMAS ADÈS (composer) Betty picked me up from LAX my first time in L.A. She sped out to wow me with Los Angeles in those first hours. We were on our way to visit David Hockney, and we were driving past the Hollywood Bowl when I saw a sign that said, “Thomas Adès, Piano.” Then I stayed with her, and not only did she have these [Joseph] Cornell boxes that she got directly from Cornell, but I also knew that this was the house where she had salons with Nancarrow, or Stockhausen and Boulez. So, in a way, I had this impression of Los Angeles as avant-gardist more than any of the reasons other people go to live there.She had very strong taste. She used to put Post-it notes on everything; one on a CD said “BORING” and another said “I DON’T LIKE THIS.” She was bracing, but could get away with it because she was also so sweet. I came back, year after year, and bought a house there, and I would trace it all back to her.FRANK GEHRY (architect) Betty didn’t want me to do Walt Disney Concert Hall, but she did invite me to her house for dinner. The person who got me involved with that project was Ernest Fleischmann [who ran the Philharmonic from 1969-1998]. He asked me to do the competition, and of course I was excited to do it. There was a lot of anti-Frank sentiment, because I worked with plywood, chain link and corrugated metal. But we proved them all wrong.SALONEN (who inaugurated Disney Hall in 2003) The timing was a bit problematic, because the L.A. riots happened in ’92, and in the aftermath the idea of building a sensational concert hall in Downtown L.A. didn’t feel like a huge priority. But the hall changed everything. Now, if you ask people about any kind of visual idea of L.A., it’s the hall. Any action scene in L.A. in a movie, at least one car chase goes by the hall.And for me, I started to understand how much nonverbal messaging there is in a building. It was open from the street level, so it was warm and inviting, and it was complex but not incomprehensible. And there’s this kind of amazing feeling of unity; the geometry is such that everybody inside the hall sees a bunch of other people at all times. It also sounds pretty good. For me, it’s still the reference for balance and sound, and it will be so until the end of my days.From left, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pamela Z and Walt Disney Concert Hall on its opening night.Los Angeles TodayBORDA We started the Green Umbrella [free-form contemporary music concerts], and had Steven Stucky and John Adams as partners for contemporary music. Steve and Esa-Pekka were extraordinarily close; they spent hours eating together, and drinking together, and talking about music and life. It was very difficult for Esa-Pekka when Steve passed on [in 2016]. Now you have Wild Up and other small groups. And you have what Yuval Sharon has done with opera. The Green Umbrella concerts are still going. There’s an appetite for all this.YUVAL SHARON (founder of the Industry opera company in Los Angeles) What drew me to L.A. was the possibility of smaller, more nimble, freer, more entrepreneurial endeavors to move with some fluidity in and among the community. When I think of L.A., I think of this John Cage book, “Silence,” in which he talks about having an interaction with a European composer who was deriding him: “How could you write so much serious music away from the center?” And Cage [who came of age in Southern California] says, “How can you write such serious music so close to the center?” That was in the 1950s, but I think there’s an element of that ethos that’s still there today.GUSTAVO DUDAMEL (who succeeded Salonen at the Philharmonic in 2009) I was a huge admirer of this orchestra and of Esa-Pekka. Los Angeles is about new things. It’s a place that every day is getting built. It’s very open all the time to new things, and I’ve loved having a relationship with John Adams, who brings these very young composers to be part of the programming of this orchestra.ADAMS Well, I think Los Angeles is teeming with composers. I wish there was that level of creativity and activity in the Bay Area.And in San FranciscoSPIVEY Knowing that Michael Tilson Thomas was going to be stepping down after 25 years at the helm, and all that he had accomplished, there was a sense that those were going to be some difficult shoes to fill. We wanted someone who was not only a great conductor, but also a great orchestra builder. And Esa-Pekka is one of those people.SALONEN Honestly, the optics of a major U.S. orchestra hiring a 60-year-old Finnish guy who’s been around the block a few times, I thought: That in itself is not sensational news. But we talked about bringing in collaborative partners [eight artists who include Chase, the composer Nico Muhly, the computer scientist Carol Reiley and more], who would energize the thinking of the orchestra.ADAMS There are still some wonderful composers from the Bay Area. So when Esa-Pekka came, and the symphony appointed their collaborative artists, and they were pretty much from New York or Europe — flying in and flying out — that was really an insult to California culture.SPIVEY Whether it’s successful or not, we’ll learn from what happens.A New FestivalPAYARE California has, all the time, been nurturing the music of the future. But everyone has been doing it on their own, which is why it was good to do the California Festival.SALONEN We are collectively proud of what has happened in California and what has kept happening, and the California Festival is a manifestation of that. And of how much there is. It’s interesting that there’s no real school. You could say that this is the birthplace of minimalism. I was talking with Terry Riley on Zoom, and I asked him if “In C” was a reaction against East Coast, European modernism. He said: “No, not really. It was more about psychedelic drugs.” I thought, Oh, he kind of nailed it, that lack of pretension here.Always ChangingGEFFEN Something that I worry about is that this state has become so expensive. We’ve already seen this in the Bay Area, that the freelance scene is not full because we’ve lost so many people to the cost of living.BORDA I think the most powerful force for good and innovation is Esa-Pekka. That gives me hope for the north. And for the south, I think what’s embedded there already won’t go away; the history of Los Angeles is reflected in that integration of different art forms and excitement at the new.ADÈS More than in London or New York, I still have a feeling that in California I’m just left to get on with things. A lot of that world of Ernest and Betty have moved on, but it’s evolved into something else. I don’t know if I’m a part of it or not, but whatever attracted me in the first place is still there, that expansion of my molecules that I instantly felt.SHARON This is a moment of real — if we want to put it euphemistically — transition. It’s not just California. Listening to my colleagues on a national level, I think that we have to redefine classical music’s role for contemporary society, and there are a lot of growing pains associated with that. Everyone has seen attendance down, and donations down, across the board. I do think that the ethos of Los Angeles will make things easier to adapt than elsewhere. The L.A. Phil is going through tremendous change in leadership. This is the moment for that attitude and perspective, the time for that push forward to show the way. It’s an opportunity for California to lead, but it’s not going to be easy. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      What Spatial Audio Can and Cannot Do for Classical Music

      by

      Immersive audio formats, while newer for pop, have been used by composers for decades. But not all works call for spatial treatment.Recent developments in spatial audio — albums old and new being mixed for immersive formats — have made news in the world of pop.Given the right production process (in the studio) and tech setup (at home), headphone sounds no longer need feel so statically pressed to each ear; instead, they can seem to whiz around your head or beckon from the nape of your neck.Or simply breathe anew. Whether you’re focusing on a stray slide-guitar accent in the Dolby Atmos mix of Taylor Swift’s “Mine (Taylor’s Version)” or appreciating the serrated details of brass-arrangement filigree in Frank Zappa’s vintage “Big Swifty,” the idea is to bring the souped-up, three-dimensional feel of large-speaker arrays into your ears.But classical music was there decades ago. Deutsche Grammophon and the Philips label both experimented with “Quadraphonic” — or four-channel releases — in the 1970s. More recently, binaural recordings and mixes, designed to simulate that 3-D feel, have been a delight. Now, though, these and other spatial-production practices are enjoying deeper corporate investment, including head-tracking technology as a feature of Apple’s newest Beats headphones. (When you move your head while wearing these — with the tracking option enabled — sound-points seem to stay fixed in your 360-degree field, even if you swerve about.)Head-tracking seemed largely pointless to me — even distracting — until I tried it with the new archival recording “Evenings at the Village Gate,” featuring John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy.Hearing Dolphy’s bass clarinet in front of my face — in a way that remained stable, even when I shook my head in wonder at his playing — allowed me the fleeting sensation that I was sharing space with the legend. A neat trick, though not one more important than Dolphy or Coltrane’s playing on its own terms.Around the time that recording was made, classical composers were bringing spatialized concepts into their creative practice. Even before the comparatively meek technology of two-channel stereo sound was standard in every home, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were using more complex mixes for works involving electronics or taped elements.There’s a reason Stockhausen is one of the cultural worthies on the cover of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”: The composer’s works, like “Gesang der Jünglinge,” from 1956, employed a five-speaker mix (including one on the ceiling). That made a lasting impression on Paul McCartney, who once described “Gesang” as his favorite “plick-plop” piece by Stockhausen.Now, more traditional corners of the classical music world are getting in on spatial audio as well.Esa-Pekka Salonen rehearsing with the San Francisco Symphony, which has released spatial audio recordings.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesLeading conductors in the orchestral world — including Riccardo Muti and Esa-Pekka Salonen — have personally approved spatial audio mixes of their recent recordings, which have been released on Apple Music and its stand-alone classical streaming app. And, as with other genres, Apple has gathered playlists of spatialized remixes.The regular players in classical music’s immersive cohort have meanwhile continued to ply their trade: Members of SWR Experimentalstudio came to the Time Spans Festival in New York this month, bringing surround-sound works by the Italian modernist Luigi Nono. And the American composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton brought a new surround-sound concept, “Thunder Music,” to the Darmstadt Summer Course in Germany.Those live performances were terrific. It’s a different story on recordings: After listening to a variety of Dolby Atmos mixes recently, I sensed that classical music’s more mainstream slate of spatial offerings remains a work in progress.Somewhere in between was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a spatial audio concept by Stockhausen, at the Shed in New York this summer. Its 124-speaker setup encircled about 200 listeners at a time. In early July, I heard a new mix of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” that suffered from muddy bass frequencies. This, unfortunately, also robbed the work of its chiseled, Minimalist grace; instead of following the bass clarinet lines, you just guessed that they were there. A sense of drama had been frittered away.Similarly, some selections you can find in Apple Music’s “Classical in Spatial Audio” playlists seem poorly selected for the format. A recording of a profound solo work like Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” isn’t exactly crying out for the spatial treatment. But when it receives one — as in an otherwise pleasant recording by Fazil Say — it merely sounds like it’s had its reverb levels jacked to the sky. It’s more distracting than moving. Such extraneous mixes are also a poor advertisement for what Dolby Atmos can provide when applied to the right repertoire.For a contrast, look to the opening work on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s recent album “Contemporary American Composers,” Jessie Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everyone.” That track is plenty inviting in its regular stereo mix; even as its singable opening motif is passed between sections, taking on new timbral colors, it never loses its openhearted sense of invitation. In the Dolby Atmos mix on Apple Music, that enveloping effect deepens. The spaces among bowed strings, brasses and percussion are wider. A centrally mixed pizzicato line takes on an even more dramatic, bridging role.The orchestra’s audio engineer, Charlie Post, said in an interview that “contemporary music seems to lend itself particularly well for this.” And he related how, since joining the Chicago Symphony in 2014, he’s been “future-proofing” sessions by recording with more microphones than are strictly necessary for radio broadcast or archival purposes. Now, when a format like Dolby Atmos comes into play, the ensemble is ready with a robust audio-capture program — think of it as a highly detailed orchestral data set — from each performance.After working with the producer David Frost and the spatial-mixing expert Silas Brown, Post is then required to get the sign-off from Riccardo Muti, the Chicago Symphony’s music director. Post recalled that when the conductor, wearing Sennheiser headphones, heard a binaural rendering of the 2018 album “Italian Masterworks,” he counted himself impressed — and gave the ensemble’s spatial-audio team his blessing to do more in this realm.“He thought it was more wide and pleasing to him,” Post said. “So that was a great thumbs-up to get.”At the San Francisco Symphony, Salonen has been equally enthusiastic — and even more hands on — with engineers as he plots coming performances and releases.“We have a very, very good team, so they don’t need any kind of mothering,” he said in a video interview. “But I’m just fascinated by the process myself, because it’s a new kind of mixing. When you position sound objects in 360 space, it becomes like a superfun computer game — very entertaining. And there are some musical artistic gains which are not gimmicky. It doesn’t have to be technology for the sake of technology; there can be an expressive purpose.”That much is clear in Salonen’s recent San Francisco recordings of music by Gyorgy Ligeti, several of which now exist as Dolby Atmos-enabled singles. (A take on Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna,” which Stanley Kubrick famously used in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” is also available on YouTube in a binaural, headphone-optimized version.)In Ligeti’s “Ramifications” — a piece that requires different orchestral groups to play in microtonally different tunings — the Dolby Atmos mix brings across the peculiar differences. Eerie, branching strings are easier to locate and appreciate, smeared across a wide soundstage; the chattering climax has fresh force.Salonen, who has been interested in blending technology with the traditional orchestra, both as a conductor and as a composer, thought about which Dolby Atmos recordings he would like to see. Thinking about Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge,” he said, “I would buy that!”Karlheinz Stockhausen, a pioneer of spatial audio in composition, conducting in 1984.Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesIn an email, Kathinka Pasveer, Stockhausen’s longtime companion and collaborator, said that there were no plans to remix the Stockhausen Verlag catalog. The market, she added, is currently too small.Apple’s market share could change that. But for now, there are other distributors of cutting-edge spatial audio compositions.The composer Natasha Barrett’s recent album “Leap Seconds” — perhaps the most vivid spatial-audio work I’ve encountered in the past decade — comes with a headphones-only binaural mix when bought from the Sargasso label. And the British label All That Dust has been releasing binaural mixes of albums on its Bandcamp page.This year, the best spatial audio purchase I’ve made was an All That Dust download of Stockhausen’s “Kontakte” for piano, percussion and electronic sounds. That may not be as newsworthy as the latest buzzy technology, but neither is it as expensive.The week I visited the Shed, tickets for the Reich show started at $46, for a concert that amounted to an hourlong playback session. But my “Kontakte” recording was something of a corrective: just 5 pounds ($6.37). With that binaural release and ones like it, you don’t need to be hustled into hyped equipment from Apple. Anyone with solid over-ear headphones — as with the Sennheiser line that Muti used in Chicago — can experience this magic. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      ‘It Has It All’: Taking on a Strange, Immense Piano Concerto

      by

      The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit discuss Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto, a rarity they are performing in San Francisco.There are piano concertos, and then there is Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto.Completed and premiered in 1904 by the Berlin Philharmonic with the composer, a virtuoso of Lisztian ability, at the piano, the piece retains a near mystical reputation. It is so difficult that only the most commanding of pianists dare take on its 75 minutes and five movements. In the last and oddest of them, a male chorus implores listeners to draw close to Allah, singing from the text of an early 19th-century version of “Aladdin” by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger.If the concerto is performed more often than it used to be, it is still enough of an anomaly in the repertoire that performances are a significant event, one of which is its San Francisco Symphony premiere this week, with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit, joined by the men of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.In a joint interview, Salonen and Levit spoke about the concerto and Busoni’s confounding stature today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Levit said that the Busoni concerto is so difficult, it can “widen your curse words repertoire.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesMy first question is, why?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN May I propose a counter-question? Why not? Last time we performed together, which was many years ago, we had a little chat over dinner about what to do next. We both happen to love the Busoni, and we thought, OK, let’s do it. These are decisions that are easily made over dinner, and then when you get to it, you realize what you’ve done. Still, I’m very happy, and the more I study the piece the more I like it, which is actually a very good sign, because it’s not always like that. Some of the ideas, especially harmonic ideas, are incredible.I can’t make up my mind whether it is a parody, or deadly serious, or what.IGOR LEVIT I think it’s both. It’s highly celebratory. I mean, the roof flies off the building, right? In the “All’Italiana,” it’s very satirical. It’s incredibly beautiful, it’s funny, it’s solemn. It has it all.Busoni has always been one of those role models I never met, in a way like an idol figure, regarding the way he thought and especially wrote about music, his utopian idea about what free music actually is, his idea about what the creator’s job is, which is to set up your own rules and not follow the rules of others.As a composer, as a pianist, as a thinker, teacher, we are speaking here of one of the most incredible minds of at least the 20th century. He was this larger-than-life figure, and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.We hardly ever hear Busoni’s music now, and yet he was so significant historically.SALONEN He really was a trailblazer, and he predicted lots of things that are now commonplace in contemporary music, like microtonality. He even at some point was fantasizing about computers, before the concept even existed.As a Finnish musician, I must say that we are very grateful to him, because he spent a couple of years in Helsinki. He was a very, very strange bird in Helsinki cultural life. And he was an incredibly important influence to Sibelius, because Sibelius suffered from this kind of country boy complex compared to contemporaries like Richard Strauss.Busoni and Sibelius became really good friends. I’m absolutely sure that to have somebody like that as a conversation partner and drinking buddy — they did quite a bit of that apparently — was incredibly important. They even had a little club, a group of friends who called themselves Leskovites, because Busoni’s dog was called Lesko. There’s a bar in Helsinki where they hung out and developed the new music for the next century.LEVIT One of the most important teachers I had in my life was Matti Raekallio. Matti is from Helsinki. Matti’s thesis was on Busoni’s fingering. He introduced me to the concerto when I was 19. He introduced me to the “Fantasia Contrappuntistica.” He introduced me to the way Busoni would play the piano, which is a very positional kind of playing, and not a graphic kind of playing.For, let’s say, a normal piano player, who grew up with rules and who studied in Central Europe or wherever, there is no such thing as Ferruccio Busoni, all you know is Bach-Busoni. You might know two or three of his chorale preludes. That’s it. But you don’t get in touch with the actual man. It was Matti who opened this incredible door for me into the thinking of the man and to the music. So even I know Busoni through Finland.SALONEN It’s funny: The first time I ever heard anything by Busoni was when I was a composition student in Siena, Italy, with Donatoni back in the late ’70s. There was a concert when some Italian pianist played Busoni’s arrangement of Schoenberg’s Opus 11, three piano pieces. He arranged Schoenberg’s piano pieces for the piano. And I thought that was the silliest thing I’d ever heard in my life.Igor, is the concerto as hard as everyone says it is?LEVIT Yeah, this is a piece to widen your curse words repertoire.What are the hardest things in it?LEVIT There are moments in the second movement that, I mean, they’re just beyond what should be acceptable in terms of how much you have to work to achieve a certain result. Toward the end, there’s this rather long passage with incredibly difficult jumps, which are asymmetrical between the left hand and the right hand. This alone is kind of utopian, and it’s also written such that no one in the audience will actually hear what you’re doing, because the orchestra is so massive.The cadenza and conclusion of the ‘All’Italiana’John Ogdon, piano; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Daniell Revenaugh, conductor (Warner)There is a spot in the “All’Italiana,” right after the cadenza, where the piano has these huge chords in left and right and they run toward each other. It’s sort of unachievable, and yet, so what? You constantly are aware of the fact that you as a pianist, are in the middle of playing something extraordinary.Busoni “was this larger-than-life figure,” Levit said, “and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesIt doesn’t strike me as an easy piece to conduct, either. The balances, for one thing.SALONEN Well, it’s massive, and as Igor said, there are moments that if you don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out, the piano will be drowned.LEVIT [Laughing] Please don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out.SALONEN But there are moments in Brahms’s piano concertos where the piano kind of sinks into the orchestra, and I think part of the expression is that zoom-in, zoom-out thing. It would be very boring if you had 75 minutes of the piano being completely on the surface at every moment. And in this case, the piano has different roles.What is the finale there for?SALONEN I have seen many incomprehensible, weird texts in my life that composers have used, but this one is right up there. I think he was planning to write a music-dramatic work based on the text by this Danish guy. He never got further than setting the final chorus, and then that found its way into the Piano Concerto.The story of this text is so funny, because the playwright was Danish, and he wrote the text in German, but his German was not great. He went and read it out loud to Goethe, and he read it out of the Danish version and translated it into German on the fly. I’m trying to imagine Goethe just sitting there listening to this guy go through this endless play, in bad German. And then various editors went through three or four rounds to fix the grammar, and finally, there is a version that is grammatically acceptable. However, Busoni liked the first version with all the wrong cases and wrong articles.LEVIT Of course he did.SALONEN And there’s something really fabulous about that. It’s basically the boulders in the cave where Aladdin takes the lamp back to. The boulders are very grateful, and they praise Allah for the beauty of nature. And a lot of it is completely incomprehensible.LEVIT But then again we’re speaking about Busoni, who was one of the great internationalists. You’re talking about this universally educated and universally interested guy. So it’s all incomprehensible and odd and weird, and yet not surprising whatsoever.SALONEN So, we’re fans.LEVIT Exactly. More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Review: Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Adriana Mater,’ After Her Death

      by

      The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the director Peter Sellars, two Saariaho collaborators, brought “Adriana Mater” to the San Francisco Symphony.The composer Kaija Saariaho, who died earlier this month at 70, spent much of her career expecting not to write an opera. She saw it as a dusty art form, she once said, and couldn’t picture translating her sound world of slow, subtle harmonic changes into melodies and arias.A pair of directors changed her mind. In the early 1990s she saw Patrice Chéreau’s staging of “Wozzeck” in Paris and Peter Sellars’s production of “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival — experiences that, she later said, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music.”Saariaho’s first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” an ethereal allegory of medieval love, premiered at Salzburg in 2000 and quickly became her most famous work. Even so, she didn’t plan to compose another.But some nudges, and a commission from the Paris Opera, led to “Adriana Mater” in 2006. Less than a week after Saariaho’s death, that sophomore outing was revived at the San Francisco Symphony — by the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sellars, two of her longtime collaborators, who first brought the work to life.The long-planned event was a ready-made memorial for news so fresh it had to be acknowledged with a program insert. On that succinct sheet of paper, Salonen touchingly remarked, “This is the first time I’ll conduct the music without my friend.” And Sellars described the performance as “the best way we know to remember her, call her back and let her go again.”“Adriana Mater” is starkly different from “L’Amour”: contemporary in its subject matter and more explicitly dramatic. But then, all of Saariaho’s operas are distinct, even if they add up to stars in the same constellation.The composer who was reluctant to write for theater would go on to create the richly nuanced monodrama “Émilie,” premiered by the soprano Karita Mattila in 2010; the Noh-inspired “Only the Sound Remains,” staged in 2016; and “Innocence,” first unveiled at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021, a work powerfully wise in its ideas and execution, a smoothly cohesive collage of styles that now seems like something of a career capstone, if not her masterpiece.History will decide what music of Saariaho’s will survive. It’s hard, however, to imagine the operas fading from the repertoire. They represent the art form at its best: elevated expression that, through storytelling, constantly revisits themes that are timeless and universal. For all their complexity, they are about how we love, how we hurt, how we die. Beyond any surface-level drama, like a school shooting in “Innocence” or war in “Adriana Mater,” these works are utterly relevant — not only in how they pertain to our moment, but also in how they capture the root of that word, as the author Garth Greenwell has observed of the French “relever,” to raise back up.The San Francisco Symphony’s production was staged by Peter Sellars and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, both of whom were involved with the opera’s premiere in 2006.Brittany Hosea-SmallThat much was clear during the San Francisco Symphony’s performances of “Adriana Mater,” which concluded on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall and were recorded for later release. Amin Maalouf, the librettist for all of Saariaho’s operas until “Innocence,” has said that the work recalls conflict in the Balkans at the end of the 20th century. But its themes resonate independent of that reference point. It is fundamentally about the uncertainty of motherhood, and about compassion in the face of brutality — about seeking, as one character says, salvation over vengeance.“Adriana Mater” is an opera of difficult questions and emotions but straightforward plot. Adriana (the mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, a mighty presence in a small frame) rebuffs Tsargo, a drunk young man, with a mixture of disgust and pity. But later, Tsargo — sung by the baritone Christopher Purves with Alberich-like bite — returns during wartime to rape her, empowered by circumstance and an assault rifle. Adriana becomes pregnant, and despite warnings from her sister, Refka (the alluringly lyrical soprano Axelle Fanyo), chooses to have the baby. “It isn’t his child,” Adriana says. “It’s mine.”But she does worry: Will the child be more like Tsargo or like her? Cain or Abel? Act II, set 17 years later, puts that uncertainty to the test when her son, Yonas (an agile, heldentenor-like Nicholas Phan) learns his father’s identity and sets out to kill him. But when he sees Tsargo, blind and broken, he cannot bring himself to do it. Yonas feels ashamed for not carrying out the murder, but his mother is relieved. He is truly her son.Saariaho’s music is rarely representational. Adriana’s offstage rape is punctuated with violent chords, and drilling percussion evokes the assault of war, but otherwise the writing favors atmosphere and abstraction. In a way that prefigures the grand tapestry of “Innocence,” she attaches specific sounds to each character: turbulent harmony for Adriana, long melodic lines for Refka, darkly shadowed low strings for Tsargo, frantic lightness for Yonas. Too often in contemporary music, conductors seem merely to be keeping time; but all this was handled deftly by Salonen, who looked as animated and assured as if he were conducting Beethoven.Sellars’s concert-hall staging was minimal, as was his original production at the Paris Opera. Here, the action unfolded on platforms of various heights that kept the singers, looking contemporary, if not specifically of any one place, in Camille Assaf’s costumes, almost always isolated. At the start, Adriana and Tsargo’s little stages, under James F. Ingalls’s lighting, were colored yellow and blue, as if to suggest that the story took place in Ukraine.But any comparison to the current war didn’t linger. The colors changed constantly, mercurial and expressive, as the action unfolded. Neither Sellars nor the opera, after all, needed an updated story to make it more recognizable. That’s already in the score, in the way Saariaho’s delicately consoling music stares down the worst of the world and says: The only way forward is grace.‘Adriana Mater’Performed on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. More