Musicians - Esa-Pekka Salonen

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	Musicians - Esa-Pekka Salonen

Esa-Pekka Salonen (born June 30, 1958 in Helsinki) is a prominent Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is currently chief conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra with which he made his US debut in 1984.

Salonen studied horn, conducting and composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. A classmate was the composer Magnus Lindberg and together they formed the new-music appreciation group Korvat auki and the experimental ensemble Toimii ("Ears open" and "It works" in the Finnish language). Later, Salonen studied with the composers Franco Donatoni, Niccolò Castiglioni and Einojuhani Rautavaara. Originally he dedicated himself to composing but in 1983 he undertook a performance of Mahler's third symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London at short notice, and it launched his career as a conductor. He was subsequently principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia from 1985 to 1994.

Principal conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra since 1985 and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra since 1991, Salonen is renowned for his dedication to performing and recording contemporary music. His 1985 world premiere recording of Witold Lutosławski's Symphony No. 3 won the 1985 Gramophone Award for Best Contemporary Recording.

Among Salonen's compositions are ...auf den ersten blick und ohne zu wissen... (1980, a saxophone concerto with a title taken from Franz Kafka's The Trial), Floof for soprano and ensemble (1982, on texts by Stanisław Lem) and the orchestral L.A. Variations (1996). In order to devote more time to composition, Salonen took a year's sabbatical from conducting in 2000, during which time he wrote a work for solo horn (Concert Étude, the competition piece for Lieksa Brass Week), Dichotomie for piano, Mania for the cellist Anssi Karttunen and sinfonietta, and Gambit, an orchestral piece that was a birthday present for fellow composer and friend Magnus Lindberg.

In 2001, Salonen composed Foreign Bodies, his largest work in terms of orchestration, which incorporated music from the opening movement of Dichotomie. Another orchestral piece, Insomnia, followed in 2002, and another, Wing On Wing, in 2004. Wing On Wing includes parts for two sopranos and distorted samples of architect Frank O. Gehry's voice as well as a fish.

As is apparant with his interpretations of such advant-garde works as Jan Sandström's Motorbike Concerto, Esa-Pekka Salonen voices a distaste for ideological and dogmatic approaches to composition and sees music creation as deeply physical. In the liner notes for Deutsche Grammophon's release of Wing On Wing, he is quoted saying "Musical expression is bodily expression, there is no abstract cerebral expression in my opinion. It all comes out of the body." A recurring theme in his music is the fusion of or relationship between the mechanical and the organic.

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