"Becoming the Next Bernstein (Or Boulez)"
by Alex Ross
The New York Times, Nov. 27, 1994
Esa-Pekka Salonen is in the belly of the beast. The brilliant young
Finnish conductor has begun his third season as music director of the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the city of eternal celebrity is making
its ominous presence felt. A few blocks away, at the Los Angeles County
Superior Court, the self-styled "trial of the century" creeps forward;
endless banks of satellite dishes beam the epic trivialities of Judge
Ito's courtroom into space. The orchestra's home is the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion, better known to billions as the historic arena of
the Oscars. Where Sally Field shrieked and Jack Nicholson smirked,
where John Williams accepted an Oscar for his score to "Star Wars," Mr.
Salonen spent a day recently rehearsing Witold Lutoslawski's intricate,
ambivalent Piano Concerto.
A decade ago, Mr. Salonen was
organizing sparsely attended avant-garde concerts in Finland. Now, at
36, he holds the most important musical post in the most media-intense
city in the world. And he has made his task more difficult by
maintaining a commitment to 20th-century repertory. Rather than
vanishing in the middle of the season, the Lutoslawski concerto
appeared defiantly in the orchestra's gala opening concert, flanked by
Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony and Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps."
A bias toward the modern also infuses the Los Angeles Philharmonic
programs Mr. Salonen will conduct this afternoon and tomorrow evening
at Avery Fisher Hall, with music of Lutoslawski, Ravel, Schoenberg,
Bartok, Sibelius and, the odd man out, Beethoven.
A recipe for
disaster? Strange to say, Mr. Salonen's tenure has been an unqualified
success. Subscriptions are up, while the average age of the audience
has declined, showing an incursion of younger listeners. One can credit
the canny long-range planning of Ernest Fleischmann, the orchestra's
managing director, or the aggressive marketing campaign that has
plastered the maestro's boyish good looks around town. But the
essential factors are Mr. Salonen's conducting, which has a graceful
dynamism about it, and his programming, which puts forward a very
distinct musical world-view.
Mr. Salonen appears to be making
headway against the toughest problem facing the American orchestra: the
aging of the established audience and the deepening indifference of
younger generations. Is he the next Leonard Bernstein, the ardently
awaited savior figure, able to explain the unfamiliar and build
audiences over time? Or is he the next Pierre Boulez, first enticing
but eventually exhausting listeners with a severe contemporary diet?
It's
too early to say, but Mr. Salonen is most likely neither. He does not
possess Bernstein's demagogic glamour or Mr. Boulez's didactic focus.
He does, however, provide the kind of decisive regional leadership that
American orchestras most need right now, more than any across-the-board
miracle cure. Audiences take notice when an orchestra acquires a vision
overnight.
MR. SALONEN BEGAN AS A composer, not a conductor,
and he still pursues composing when time allows. He grew up in an
aberrant musical culture that treats composers with respect. Like other
Scandinavian countries, Finland gives generous support to the arts, and
composers are lavished with commissions and grants.
"It was
like a bloody greenhouse," Mr. Salonen said between rehearsals,
speaking impeccable British-accented English. "Until I was about 25, I
never gave any thought to the pragmatic aspects of music-making, such
as having an audience. Sometimes we had contemporary-music concerts,
and maybe four people would come, including my mother."
His
base was the Finnish avant-garde collective Ears Open, which he formed
with the composers Magnus Lindberg, Jouni Kaipainen and Kaija Saariaho.
Their works deployed a full range of post-Serialist devices, although
they avoided the major pitfalls of European esotericism. Even the most
teemingly complex music from this group had an overall lucidity of
structure, a kind of landscape wholeness characteristic of Scandinavian
music in all periods. Mr. Salonen's music, which has been collected on
a Finlandia disk, is extrovert and eclectic, scampering through
minutely detailed motifs and timbres.
More or less by default,
Mr. Salonen conducted Ears Open concerts. "I never planned a career as
a conductor," he said. "When I was studying composition, I looked at
conductors as the main enemies of music. The image of Karajan
conducting 'Heldenleben' and riding a motorbike in his leather jacket
was very far removed from the things we were trying to do. It happened
very gradually, but I started feeling the pull of Bruckner and
Beethoven, not to mention the 20th-century classics, and they just
gradually took over."
In storybook fashion, he burst on the
international scene in 1983, summoned at the last minute to conduct the
London Philharmonia in Mahler's Third Symphony. His overnight triumph
led to a full-time appointment with the Swedish Radio Symphony and an
American debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1984. A subsequent
contract with Sony Classical has produced dozens of recordings, among
them definitive accounts of major works by Messiaen and Lutoslawski, an
excellent Stravinsky series and one of the best modern versions of
Mahler's Fourth Symphony. After a stint as principal guest conductor,
Mr. Salonen replaced Andre Previn as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's
music director in 1992.
From the evidence of two recent
rehearsals, he has established an easy rapport with The orchestra. He
takes a cool, understated approach, not at all dictatorial. Indeed, he
has a tendency to mumble. Rehearsing "Le Sacre du Printemps," he made
brief remarks that were inaudible from the front seats in the
auditorium and possibly to many of the players as well. But his wishes
are conveyed all the same; on a second try, the passage in question
came into sharper focus. Balancing on the balls of his feet in a
gymnastic stance, nervously gesticulating toward his ears when
something displeases him, he is unmistakably in command. The orchestra
sounds better than ever, clearly in the front rank of American
ensembles.
Any conductor in Los Angeles must also establish a
good rapport with Mr. Fleischmann, renowned for his sometimes
domineering treatment of conductors and his controversial ideas about
the role of the modern orchestra. Serving as music director in the
Fleischmann regime entails any number of tasks outside the regular
subscription schedule: leading contemporary-music and chamber-orchestra
ensembles, delivering preconcert lectures, conducting youth concerts,
and traveling with the orchestra to Los Angeles neighborhoods and
schools that have no easy access to orchestral music.
Pronouncing
the traditional orchestra an outdated institution, Mr. Fleischmann has
called for a more flexible "community of musicians" to take its place.
Yet he is severely critical of the 1993 American Symphony Orchestra
League report, "Americanizing the American Orchestra," which proposed
that orchestras abandon an elite stance and literally dress themselves
down for different audiences.
"All that has nothing to do with
what we're here for," Mr. Fleischmann said. "No matter what the origin
or background of the audience, it still recognizes quality, and it
still recognizes integrity. If we pursue a clear artistic direction,
people will become more passionate about what we do."
Mr.
Salonen is of the same mind. "I don't think anything drastic is
needed," he said, "because obviously we are acting on the basic
hypothesis that classical music is good, that classical music has to
exist. We don't need to wear different clothes or funny hats, and we
don't have to deny the basic fact that symphony orchestras are
specialist groups who play certain segments of the music of the world.
Either this music we play has enough energy and a message intense
enough to be able to survive, or it doesn't."
The radical point
in Mr. Salonen's agenda is his insistence that the repertory be
centered on the music of this century. "If you want to reach a young
person who has not learned classical music at home or in the schools,
the best repertory is 20th-century repertory rather than Mozart or
Haydn or Beethoven. Just because of the familiarity of the sound world,
something like 'Le Sacre' gives you a sense of recognition, even if
your only point of reference is rock music. It doesn't belong to the
establishment; there is no political or class difference."
Many
conductors make earnest gestures toward contemporary music, programming
the work of the temporarily popular composer X or the critically
fashionable composer Y. Mr. Salonen's commitment goes deeper. Some
two-thirds of the scores he has conducted in the last three years were
written in this century: among them, four works of Schoenberg, seven of
Stravinsky and four of Lutoslawski, alongside music of Henri Dutilleux,
Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Roger Reynolds, Elliott Carter, Steven
Stucky, Bernard Rands and Kaija Saariaho.
With 20th-century
music, presentation is everything. The longstanding method of tempting
audiences with a war horse, then sneaking in a premiere beside it often
falls flat, because it fails to establish a context for the new piece;
the discrepancy between old and new is all the more plain. (One is
reminded of the Bernstein concert that absurdly paired John Cage's
"Atlas Eclipticalis" with Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony.)
MR.
SALONEN, BY contrast, relies on what he calls 20th-century classics:
works of Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok that are foreign neither to the
average concertgoer nor to the newer pieces he is advocating. An
elegant example was a 1993 juxtaposition of Debussy and Ligeti, in
which Mr. Ligeti's intensely atmospheric instrumental style could be
heard beside its Impressionist predecessor.
This blend of the
shocking and the no-longer-shocking took a while to catch on. "After a
kind of hesitant beginning," Mr. Salonen recalled, "something happened
in the spring of the first season. All of a sudden the kind of program
that was selling out at the box office was Bartok's Second Violin
Concerto and a Haydn symphony." He sensed he was beginning to reach out
to an audience that ordinarily paid no attention to orchestral
concerts.
"There's a crowd that goes to contemporary art
exhibitions, art cinema and so forth," he continued, "people who
basically use their brains more than average people, but they don't
come to classical-music concerts. They don't see a symphony orchestra
as part of the contemporary art scene. But now they've started to
realize that the Philharmonic is moving into this century."
Mr.
Salonen's new audience, if it stays interested, could have far-reaching
implications for the way concerts are sold. "I think we are coming to a
point where it will be increasingly difficult to market all your
subscriptions as one package," he said. "People in my generation and
the younger generation are more eclectic in their tastes, very specific
about what they want to do. I would like to be a part of that kind of
menu."
Mr. Salonen is one of several younger conductors who
have shaken up orchestral and also operatic programming in recent
years. Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano and Myung-Whun Chung are the best
known, and Mr. Salonen considers them allies, not rivals. In
particular, Mr, Rattle's remarkable achievement in building an audience
for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra through unconventional
repertory is a good omen for the new Los Angeles regime.
A
SLIGHTLY LESS ENCOURAGING analogy is Pierre Boulez's iconoclastic
seven-year tenure with the New York Philharmonic in the 1970's. Mr.
Salonen acknowledges the "slightly frightening parallel" between his
career and that of Mr. Boulez, whom he admires and speaks to often. But
there are important differences.
First, Mr. Salonen does not
disdain the standard repertory; he is an acclaimed Haydn conductor, and
his Beethoven interpretations (in contrast to Mr. Boulez's) seem to
have pleased rather than alienated the broad public. He also has a
filial enthusiasm for widely beloved Scandinavian Romantics like Grieg,
Sibelius and Nielsen. Second, the contemporary music Mr. Salonen has
promoted in Los Angeles is generally not the sort that drives audiences
away. He is openly critical of some of the more unsociable trends of
the postwar era, particularly Serialism.
"The basic assumption
in Serial music was that language could be created," he said. "But
language can't be created, unless you happen to be some kind of god. To
make it functional, you also have to create people who speak the same
language. It's like Esperanto; if you look at Esperanto from an
objective point of view, it's the best language in the world, because
it's absolutely logical, solid, very easy to learn, no dialects, no
problems or exceptions in the grammar. Yet no one speaks it. The same
thing happened to Serialism."
He does not sympathize, however,
with the neo-conservatives who disavow the whole postwar avant-garde as
an erroneous detour. "There was still a lot of good music composed in
that period," he said. "We learned so much about musical textures via
Serialism. But the freedom from it is liberating. I think we might be
coming to the point where it's possible to compose again. You don't
have to be neo-something, neo-Romantic or whatever; you can just write
music. People from very different angles are heading toward something
that could become a mainstream musical language. The kind of things
that John Adams writes today can sound surprisingly much like Magnus
Lindberg."
For Mr. Salonen, the giants of this new mainstream
are composers like Messiaen and Lutoslawski, who exploited or even
initiated technical advances without becoming attached to any school of
thought. Between the arrogant idealism of Serialism and the panicky
nostalgia of neo-Romanticism is a middle path of complex but seductive
sound, in which the myriad possibilities of 20th-century
experimentation are absorbed into a clear musical picture.
Mr.
Salonen is particularly devoted to Lutoslawski, who died in February
and whose valedictory Fourth Symphony is on the Avery Fisher Hall
program tomorrow. "He found his true and final language at the age of
70," Mr. Salonen said. "In his last works the balance between form and
content is perfect. He was one of the few composers who was able to
play with the listener's experience of form. There are sections where
very little happens, in order to make the appearance of the next event
more effective. It's the technique of a classical master."
Mr.
Salonen's reverence for the music of his colleagues is, of course,
rooted in his own urge to compose. He is the only conductor of a major
American orchestra, and one of the very few conductors worldwide, who
pursues an active composing career. Now that he is established in Los
Angeles, he wants more time to write music.
"I was very pleased
when it came out," he said of the Finlandia CD of his music. "But then
I was holding it in my hand, and I thought, this is 10 years of my life
on one bloody CD. I was very jumpy that afternoon; I called my agent
immediately and said: 'Cancel this. Cancel that. I need more time to
work.' Then I went and accepted a commission for a big piece for 1997.
"But
I don't regret the time spent on conducting," he added. "It's wonderful
to be able to work with this music, and I feel very privileged.
Sometimes I have these funny moments of joy. I'm studying the score,
and I suddenly realize how great the music is, and I'm overcome by very
powerful feelings of euphoria."
In Los Angeles, the euphoria is no longer his alone.
