“I had this one morning—it was like a vision,” the Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen recently told an audience in Los Angeles, at the end of one of those grand, warm Southern California days which you hope will never end. He was describing something that he had experienced not long after he became the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in 1992. “I woke up early, and my two little daughters were still asleep and so was my wife, and I saw the hummingbirds outside my window, and the sun was shining. And I felt this very strange thing. I couldn’t quite know what it was. I went to the kitchen and I made myself a cup of coffee. As I was sitting there, I thought, Why do I feel like this? What is it? And then I realized that I felt . . . free. Nice feeling.” Free, he explained, from the totems and taboos of modernism; free to investigate new canons in music and art; free to become himself.
Salonen was speaking at the Apple Store in Santa Monica. He had been invited there to discuss one of his recent works—“Helix,” a dense, hard-driving, buoyant tone poem for orchestra—and the computer programs that he employs to notate and elaborate his ideas. More than a hundred people, ranging from longtime Philharmonic subscribers to college-age electronic-music enthusiasts, squeezed in among the iMacs and the iPods to see Salonen in person. He’s an unusual kind of celebrity—a fixed point of cerebral cool in a city of spectacle and flux.
Commonly referred to in the Philharmonic offices as E.-P., Salonen is a short, compact man, preternaturally boyish in appearance. It doesn’t quite compute that next year he will turn fifty. Some years ago, People offered him the opportunity to be one of its “Most Beautiful People”; he declined. A native of Helsinki, he speaks in a polyglot diction made up, variously, of the fluid singsong of the Finnish language, a kind of BBC-announcer plumminess, bits of various Continental languages, and an array of American idioms, some of them picked up from his daughters, Ella and Anja (who are now teen-agers). Reserved by nature, he is nonetheless a winning speaker, puncturing his maestro façade with deadpan jokes, whimsical digressions, “Who, me?” inflections, and a favorite facial expression of the cat-that-ate-the-canary type.
Salonen told the crowd about his first years with the Philharmonic. “I was then a little over thirty years old,” he said. “And I was being given this orchestra to conduct. What other city would be prepared to do this—give one of the top orchestras in the world to some guy from Finland nobody has ever heard of? And yet they did that. And all along I felt this tremendous support. ‘O.K., show us. Do something with it. Just run with it.’ ”
Run with it he did: Salonen proceeded to make the L.A. Philharmonic the most contemporary-minded orchestra in America. Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” became the center of the repertory, not the outer limit. Conductor and listeners met each other halfway, the latter opening themselves to new sounds and the former softening his modernist edge. In 2003, with the opening of Frank Gehry’s silver-winged Walt Disney Concert Hall, in downtown L.A., the Philharmonic acquired the most architecturally striking and acoustically satisfying performance space of modern times. More good things followed: a festival called Minimalist Jukebox brought in thousands of new listeners, and Peter Sellars’s production of “Tristan und Isolde,” set to a full-length film by Bill Viola, remade Wagner’s medieval tragedy as a ritual of watery immersion and purification. (The “Tristan Project” returned to Disney last week, and will appear at Lincoln Center on May 2nd and 5th.) Flush with money, free of contract disputes, playing to near-capacity audiences, capitalizing on new technologies such as iTunes (“Helix” will be released online in May), the L.A. Phil has become that rare creature: a happy orchestra.
The one person who wasn’t entirely content was Salonen. His main ambition has always been to compose. Although he has found time to write some notable works in recent years—his surprisingly extravagant, Romantically expressive Piano Concerto had its première with the New York Philharmonic in February—he has not felt as free as he would wish, his days still taken up with conducting, rehearsals, meetings, public appearances, and interviews. After a “Tristan” rehearsal on April 7th, with the strains of Isolde’s “Liebestod” still hanging in the air, Salonen told the orchestra that he was going to step down from the podium in the summer of 2009, so that he could spend more time composing, and so that the players could have a fresh start. As he explained a couple of days later, “What I didn’t want to see was that I’d sit on top of the orchestra like Jabba the Hutt and prevent every other life form from emerging.” (This is the place to mention that the youngest of Salonen’s three children, Oliver, is eight.) He will continue to conduct, though at a slower pace—in the season after next, he will take up a less time-consuming position with the Philharmonia Orchestra, in London, where his wife, Jane, was once a violinist—and he will retain a role, as yet undefined, at the Philharmonic.
The orchestra was still absorbing Salonen’s news when Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, got up to make a second announcement. In secret consultation with the Artistic Liaison Committee, which consists of five Philharmonic musicians, the administration had selected as the orchestra’s next music director Gustavo Dudamel, a twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan. In 2004, Salonen had served on the jury of a conducting competition in Bamberg, Germany, where Dudamel was among the entrants. After a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Salonen had called Borda to tell her that he had encountered a “real conducting animal,” and that it might be good to engage Dudamel for a guest appearance in Los Angeles. Dudamel has conducted the Philharmonic twice in the past two years. With an eye toward finding Salonen’s successor, Borda had asked the members of the orchestra to evaluate every guest conductor who passed through. Dudamel received almost entirely positive responses.
The announcement of Dudamel’s hiring was made official at a Monday-morning press conference. Three nights later, in a hall thrown into darkness—the blue step lights glimmering like stars seen through the rigging of a ship—Salonen set Act I of “Tristan und Isolde” in motion. Like so many of his performances in the past, it was precise in rhythm and rich in timbre; few conductors give as clean a beat or have so acute an ear for combinations of sounds. But there was an unchecked heat in the playing that you didn’t hear so often in the early years of Salonen’s tenure, when his urge to control detail led to excitingly rigorous renditions of Stravinsky and Schoenberg and some emotionally constrained Mozart and Beethoven. Making wide, broadly curving gestures with the baton, he let himself be carried along by Wagner’s music as much as he directed it. As he backs away from conducting, he gets better at it.
The Salonen era in L.A. may mark a turning point in the recent history of classical music in America. It is a story not of an individual magically imprinting his personality on an institution—what Salonen has called the “empty hype” of conductor worship—but of an individual and an institution bringing out unforeseen capabilities in each other, and thereby proving how much life remains in the orchestra itself, at once the most conservative and the most powerful of musical organisms.
America has always been besotted with orchestras. Nowhere else in the world is symphonic music so canonized as an instrument of public edification and a symbol of civic pride; in the European capitals, the center of musical life has always been the opera house. At the turn of the last century, the great and the good of every Eastern and Midwestern metropolis felt it their duty to build an ornate concert hall, hire the finest musicians on the market, obtain a foreign-born maestro to lead them, and present concerts of beloved classics. For decades, these institutions perpetuated themselves with little change to the basic formula. The orchestra business expanded dramatically after the Second World War: where there had been dozens of professional orchestras, now there were hundreds. Cold War politics had something to do with the proliferation; John F. Kennedy’s America was keen to prove that it could out-culture the Russians. Even now, the number of ensembles remains vast: nearly four hundred professional orchestras and some fifteen hundred volunteer, youth, and collegiate orchestras.
In recent years, many of these groups have had a rocky time. Audiences have grown older. Neighborhoods surrounding concert halls in cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati have emptied out and turned derelict. The multipurpose performing-arts centers that arose in the financially flush Cold War years have aged badly, their governmental façades often uninviting to the uninitiated. Despite the grim signs, though, almost all of America’s orchestras have clung to life. Indeed, in the past year or two, many have reported a slight but hopeful uptick in attendance.
Some of the best news of late has come from California, which has never had much invested in the imitation of Europe. In 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas took over the San Francisco Symphony, which already had a reputation for innovation, and added to it his pinpoint musicianship, his eclectic taste, his gift for explaining classical music to novice listeners, and his knack for elegant spectacle. The first M.T.T. season closed with a joyous American festival whose programs ranged from Ives’s “Holidays” Symphony to a Cagean improvisation by surviving members of the Grateful Dead.
The rise of the L.A. Philharmonic was a more unexpected development. For much of the century, it had been considered an ensemble of the second rank—“not too much more than a glorified community orchestra,” one veteran player told me. It was founded in 1919 by William Andrews Clark, Jr., the son of one of Montana’s Copper Kings. Clark was a skilled amateur violinist, a collector of books and manuscripts (including a formidable array of materials relating to Oscar Wilde), and an attentive companion to various handsome young men whom he had rescued from society’s margins. In the nineteen-thirties, the Philharmonic achieved distinction under the august expatriate conductor Otto Klemperer, but the best orchestras in town belonged to the movie studios, where so many refugees from Hitler found employment. After the war, the Philharmonic subsided into an era of sleepy stasis, its finances in constant crisis. In the orchestra’s archives, I found a forlorn report for the year 1963, showing a hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar deficit on a less than million-dollar budget.
The orchestra decided that it would have to take some risks. First, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the wife of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, raised money for what promised to be a splendid new concert hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Second, the orchestra appointed its first whiz-kid music director—the twenty-six-year-old Zubin Mehta. And, most important, in 1969 it hired as its managing director Ernest Fleischmann, who, at the age of eighty-two, remains an éminence grise of the Los Angeles scene. In the late sixties, Fleischmann was a hot-tempered revolutionary in the classical world, preaching the message that the modern orchestra could no longer run through the same old repertory for aging subscribers. It would have to become a more adaptable organism—a “community of musicians,” Fleischmann said, able to perform new-music and chamber concerts, make school appearances, and play all kinds of repertory. It would also have to submit to the will of a strong manager.
After a period of excitement, there was another tapering off. Mehta left for the New York Philharmonic. The Chandler Pavilion turned out to be acoustically deadening. Carlo Maria Giulini and André Previn had relatively short regimes. Fleischmann, who was born to Jewish parents in Germany and grew up in South Africa, saw the need for a second revolution. He would require another hall and another conductor, both of a new kind. “We don’t want a temple of culture—rather, a welcoming kind of place,” Fleischmann said of the projected hall in 1988. A competition was held, and the winner was Frank Gehry, at that time a much talked about but underemployed deconstructionist, who, in the seventies, had contributed modifications to the Philharmonic’s summer home, the Hollywood Bowl. As for the conductor, he would have to be a thinker as well as a virtuoso.
In 1983, on a flight from Marseilles to London, Fleischmann encountered an artist manager who told him that some Finnish singers had been raving about a young conductor with a funny name that he couldn’t remember. Fleischmann spent the night in London before flying on to Los Angeles, and while there he learned that a man named Esa-Pekka, obviously the funnily named conductor in question, had been engaged at the last minute to conduct Mahler’s Third Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
“This was a Monday,” Fleischmann told me at lunch, in his gravelly, courtly accent. “I had meetings scheduled on Tuesday with some L.A. City Council people—grant proposal, that kind of thing. We needed the money. Halfway through the plane flight home, I thought to myself that I had made a terrible mistake. I should have stayed to hear the Finn. I couldn’t ask the pilot to turn the plane around, so I went to my meetings on Tuesday and then on Wednesday I flew back to London. I heard EsaPekka’s performance of the Mahler Third, and I was totally blown away. I went around backstage to meet him, and there was this guy with a can of beer in his hand, in short sleeves, and I thought he must be all right.”
Salonen is characteristically wry when he recalls his first American visit, which took place in 1984, at Fleischmann’s invitation. “I was a very European product,” Salonen says. “By any measure, I was a piece of vintage Eurotrash.” After conducting the Philharmonic in a program that included Witold Lutoslawski’s alternately turbulent and transcendent Third Symphony, Salonen let himself be taken out to a club by a staff member. After standing in a corner, he mustered the courage to approach an attractive woman who was sitting at the bar. She asked what he was doing in the city. “Well, I just conducted the L.A. Philharmonic,” he said. “That’s the dumbest line I ever heard,” she said, and walked away.
This is a familiar genre of Salonen anecdote, in which the protagonist assumes an attitude of self-importance and then collides with reality. “In one Presidential election in Finland,” he recently told a group of friends at dinner, “I was actually a write-in candidate.” He paused while eyebrows were respectfully raised. “I received, in fact, two votes, just behind Donald Duck.”
At his house, a white-walled, luminously modern place in Brentwood, he told me how the pianist Mitsuko Uchida once visited his home studio, which contains a Steinway piano that once belonged to the émigré conductor Bruno Walter. “Of course, I was very proud of this piano,” Salonen said. “And so I said to Mitsuko”—he lowers his voice the interval of a fifth and brings out the Anglo element in his cosmopolitan accent—‘You really have to try my piano. It used to belong to Bruno Walter.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ Mitsuko said. She sat down, played a couple of things, and stopped. ‘Esa-Pekka! Yuck! ’ ”
These gestures of self-deprecation can go only so deep. Sheepish fellows do not become directors of major orchestras. Salonen’s cool sometimes shades into coolness, even steeliness. He avoids gushing enthusiasm—“Very good!” is high praise from him—and he can cause agitation in subordinates by saying something like “That’s actually not O.K.” and then falling silent. He lacks the American gift for filling in the holes in a conversation with reassuring blather, and one learns not to hear his silences as awkward pauses. He likes to cite an adage of his homeland: a Finnish introvert looks at his own shoes, while a Finnish extrovert looks at other people’s shoes.
Salonen was born to middle-class, music-loving parents in 1958. When he was four, his mother tried to get him to play the piano, and he “refused point blank,” he says, “because it was very clear to me that girls play piano and boys play the soccer.” (He has now revised his opinion: “Girls can play the soccer as well.”) He eventually started playing the French horn, because, an older musician told him, it was easier to get into an orchestra as a horn player. But it was the experience of hearing Olivier Messiaen’s sublimely over-the-top “Turangalîla Symphony,” at the age of ten or eleven, that inflamed his desire to compose.
In the seventies, many Finnish composers were still writing moody symphonies in the spirit of Sibelius, although some had fastened onto twelve-tone writing and other advanced techniques. By the time Salonen enrolled in composition and conducting classes at the Sibelius Academy, the country’s main music school, he was eager to preach the gospel of the difficult; at one point, he wrote a paper on “the defeat of tonalism,” and once disrupted a school party by putting on an LP of Pierre Boulez’s fascinating but thoroughly undanceable “Le Marteau sans Maître.”
At the Sibelius Academy, Salonen fell in with a cadre of teen-age avant-gardists, among them Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho. They formed a collective called Korvat Auki!, or Ears Open!, and began putting on concerts of new music for the people, at which the people did not always consent to appear. One legendary evening, devoted to the Argentine-German conceptual composer Mauricio Kagel, drew an audience consisting of two elderly ladies who had come by mistake; another attracted a janitor, his dog, and the mother of one of the composers. Lindberg’s gloriously cacophonous “Kraft” had its première on a bizarre program that also featured Teresa Berganza singing Handel arias. The mezzo-soprano was forced to sing “Ombra mai fù” while auto parts, office-chair legs, and other metal objects dangled on wires behind her, waiting to be banged in the noise symphony to follow. “Only the extreme is interesting,” Lindberg would say. Salonen agreed.
The Ears Open! composers have since moved away from sonic extremities. Their music is now less hard-nosed, less dissonant, more lyrical, more spacious, although it hardly counts as easy listening. Salonen has devised a personal vocabulary in which he customarily uses hexachords, or scale fragments made up of six notes; when all six sound together, ear-cleansing dissonances can result, although he likes to tease out tonal melodies from the material. He revealed a lyrical bent in 1999, in a song cycle called “Five Images After Sappho,” written for Dawn Upshaw. “Wing on Wing,” a vocal-orchestral work from 2004, is a haunting evocation of the swooping forms of Disney Hall itself, and it incorporates recorded samples of Frank Gehry’s voice. There’s an amazing section toward the end of the score in which Gehry is heard saying “Go to the beginning,” in a brief repeating loop, while drones and trills bubble up from the darkest regions of the orchestra. Salonen seems to have followed this instruction in several recent pieces, sculpting rough-hewn melodies and forms that give primal weight to fantastically sophisticated textures.
Just what role California has played in Salonen’s musical development remains to be determined by his official Finnish biographer. (The composer claims to be approaching what he calls, in a rough translation from the Finnish, the “shitting deaf mute,” or elderly-notable, stage of his career, and therefore requires a biography.) Certainly, his work as a conductor and his residence in Los Angeles have given him new influences. Pulsating, pop-inflected rhythms can be heard in “Foreign Bodies” (2001), which will be choreographed by the Diavolo dance company at the Bowl this summer, and also in “Helix.” For a while, he listened to rock on his way home after concerts, letting his twenty-something drivers pick the CDs. He was deeply impressed by Radiohead’s 1997 album “OK Computer,” and once went out for drinks with members of the band. Like most thinking people, he admires Björk, although at the gym he prefers Shakira. While he admits that most other pop music either baffles or bores him, he remains open to the idea that a pop album could floor him as “OK Computer” did, and wants to unleash similar forces in his own music, a mixture of the brainy and the visceral.
Salonen is steeped in the culture of the Los Angeles émigrés—the throng of composers, musicians, writers, artists, and filmmakers who moved to neighborhoods like West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades in the thirties and forties. He can tell you exactly where Brecht lived, and Thomas Mann, and Rachmaninoff, and, of course, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. (Salonen once considered buying Stravinsky’s old house, on North Wetherly Drive, but he was spooked by the fact that you could still see indentations on the carpet where the composer’s piano had stood.) The émigrés fell into roughly two categories: those who Americanized themselves, such as Frederick Kohner, who wrote the novel “Gidget” and helped to codify surfer slang, and those who stayed aloof, such as Theodor Adorno, sitting in his house on South Kenter Avenue, and writing darkly of the interchangeability of totalitarianism and capitalism.
Salonen falls somewhere comfortably in the middle. His music elegantly threads together the aristocratic complexity of his European musical training and the blunt energy of his adopted city. Plain chords come up against seething textures; a melody surges in and floats away. His conversation follows a similar cultural spiral. In front of an audience at Disney Hall in January, he launched into a disquisition on Mahler’s Seventh Symphony and Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; the progression from late-Romantic opulence to early modern austerity, he said, resembled the collapse of a giant star into a white dwarf. As he was unfurling this metaphor, he paused to note, “White Dwarf was actually what I was called on my school hockey team.”
Salonen had his path mapped out from the moment he arrived in Los Angeles. When I first met him, in 1994, he told me, “There’s this crowd who go to contemporary-art exhibitions and see art cinema—people who basically use their brains more than average people. But they don’t come to classical-music concerts. It’s a problem of perception. They don’t see an orchestra as part of the contemporary art scene. It’s not a conversation item in their circles, because symphony orchestras play Beethoven and audiences are eighty-five years old. Now people are realizing that the Philharmonic is moving into this century.”
In the early years, the theory was more convincing than the execution. Players recall a withdrawn young man who was inaudible in rehearsal and difficult to talk to afterward. Insistent programming of thorny European works by Lutoslawski, Luciano Berio, and György Ligeti led to a drop in attendance. A couple of years in, members of the orchestra met with him and urged him to pay more attention to the subscribers’ taste. If the usual story had unfolded, Salonen would have either caved in or gone back to Europe muttering about the backwardness of the Americans. Instead, he stubbornly persisted, although he became savvier about mixing old and new in his programs, drawing connections between the mainstream repertory and modern fare. He leaned heavily on what he called “twentieth-century classics”—pieces such as the “Rite” and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra—next to which a new piece by Ligeti or Lindberg or Steven Stucky, the orchestra’s longtime composer-in-residence, made intuitive sense.
Gehry’s new concert hall was crucial to Salonen’s calculations, but for some years it seemed as though it might never be built. After ground was broken, in December, 1992, projected costs mounted into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and donors could not be found to augment the original fifty-million-dollar gift from Lillian Disney, Walt Disney’s widow. (The Disney Company has no connection to the hall, nor do most major Hollywood players; the Philharmonic has long been the province of old-money families from Pasadena.) Fleischmann and Salonen pressed ahead. In 1996, Salonen told Mark Swed, the chief classical-music critic of the Los Angeles Times, “Somehow I’ve ruled out the option of the hall not happening.”
Fleischmann retired in 1998. Two years later, following a confusing interregnum involving a Dutch executive, Borda, a diminutive, propulsive Manhattanite, arrived. Salonen had sought her out, and at first she seemed an odd choice. She was at that time the executive director of the New York Philharmonic, a wealthier and more conservative institution. “It was like being president of Harvard, which I did not at first realize was not necessarily a good thing,” Borda says. She’d had an often combative relationship with Kurt Masur, who was then the orchestra’s music director. Earlier in her career, she had thrived in offbeat settings, managing a new-music ensemble in Boston and working alongside the composer John Adams at the San Francisco Symphony, but in New York she felt as if a box were closing in on her. “Esa-Pekka brought me back to life,” she says. “This orchestra saved me.”
Like Fleischmann before her, Borda is a formidable executive who runs the orchestra like a lean company, not like a flabby non-profit. She is aggressive when she needs to be, as she proved when she snatched Gustavo Dudamel away from a half-dozen orchestras interested in retaining his services. She has put the organization on solid financial footing. When it moved to Disney Hall, in 2003, it actually expanded its operations, posting a one-year sales increase of sixty-two per cent. The nightly sellouts of the first Disney season couldn’t be sustained, but the Philharmonic still sells a very respectable ninety-two per cent of its tickets. It depends less on charitable contributions than most big-league orchestras do; seventy-five per cent of its eighty-four-million-dollar budget is derived from regular-season ticket sales and other income, such as the lucrative summer season at the Hollywood Bowl. There is a conspicuous lack of tension between the players and the management.
Yet, despite the on-message, onbudget managerial ethos, the L.A. Philharmonic remains an unpredictable place, still the most experimental of American orchestras. One crucial member of the staff is Chad Smith, a thirty-five-year-old native of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who began his career as an operatic tenor of the fair-haired, dashing type and then took a sharp left turn into progressive music programming. He is now the vice-president of artistic planning, which means that he is in charge of shaping the programs and cultivating visiting musicians. “I spent a couple of years listening to Esa-Pekka,” Smith says, “and got the sense that the thinking always needed to be bigger, not big in scale but big in imagination. That’s how we started thinking about minimalism.”
The Minimalist Jukebox festival, which Adams curated last season, was originally supposed to be a relatively conventional series of programs linking minimalist composers and earlier classical repertory—say, Steve Reich and Bach. But this seemed too boring for Disney Hall. What emerged instead was a two-week festival that ranged from classic minimalist pieces by Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass to post-minimalist works such as Michael Gordon’s “Decasia” and Glenn Branca’s “Hallucination City,” a symphony for a hundred electric guitars. The series kicked off with an all-night show by the Orb, a British group that plays ambient house music. Subscribers fled en masse, exchanging their tickets for other series, but the empty seats were filled by new, much younger listeners. The festival came close to breaking even, despite the fact that some ticket prices had been reduced to accommodate a less genteel crowd.
Perhaps Borda’s boldest notion is to give visiting composers such as Adams and Thomas Adès the same royal treatment that is extended to the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell; Borda talks about “hero composers.” A recent performance of Adams’s monumental California symphony “Naïve and Sentimental Music” in the orchestra’s Casual Fridays series—a shortened program in which the players skip formal dress and mingle with listeners afterward—drew a nearly full house. Borda’s big-guns approach has invigorated the orchestra’s long-running new-music series, called Green Umbrella, which Fleischmann established in 1982. In the early days, it drew modest audiences, but in recent years attendance has risen to the point where as many as sixteen hundred people show up for a concert that in other cities might draw thirty or forty. The Australian composer Brett Dean recently walked onstage for a Green Umbrella concert and did a double take, saying that it was the largest new-music audience he’d ever seen.
In the coming years, an ambitious series of festivals will define the orchestra’s relationship to various American landscapes. Next season, Concrete Frequency, under the direction of the conductor David Robertson, will provide various sonic snapshots of urban life, from the steely modernity of Varèse’s “Amériques” to the chaotic nostalgia of Ives’s “Central Park in the Dark.” Smith, who lives in a loft downtown and follows the city’s alternative scenes, hopes also to include some yet to be determined combination of films, d.j.s, hip-hop artists, graffiti-art exhibits, krumping (a furious dance style from South Central L.A.), and, possibly, skateboarding. The following season, Dudamel will preside over a festival of music from North and South America, capitalizing on L.A.’s status as a half-Hispanic city. After that, Adams returns to direct a festival by and about California artists.
One area in which the orchestra has done less well is in promoting younger composers. Speaking at an education conference in New York in February, Salonen said, “Institutions tend to play it safe. They are less willing to commission a large work by a young composer. They don’t want to take the risk. It’s the same old names that keep being circulated all the time.” This is precisely what any number of composers who are not Adams, Adès, Stucky, or a half-dozen others might say about the Philharmonic itself. As the “hero composers” idea takes hold, the orchestra might want to challenge its own philosophy by taking chances on twenty-six-year-old composers, as it has on twenty-six-year-old conductors.
The Philharmonic is trying to solve the ultimate mystery of the orchestra business, which is how to attract new listeners without alienating established ones. The core audience will always be longtime lovers of classical music who mainly want to hear symphonies of Beethoven and concertos of Rachmaninoff. Then, there are Salonen’s “people who basically use their brains more”—who ought to be at classical concerts but usually aren’t. To serve both audiences, the orchestra becomes, in effect, two institutions folded into one—a museum of masterpieces and a gallery of new work. A number of music directors in other cities—notably, Robertson in St. Louis, Robert Spano in Atlanta, Marin Alsop in Baltimore, James Levine in Boston, and Osmo Vänskä in Minneapolis—are moving in the same direction. Suddenly, it no longer makes sense to generalize about the hidebound attitude of the American orchestra.
As for the players themselves, their greatest resource is flexibility. The Cleveland Orchestra may still hold the crown for the most flawlessly polished sound, but no American orchestra matches the L.A. Philharmonic in its ability to assimilate a huge range of music on a moment’s notice. Adès, who first conducted his own music in L.A. two years ago and has become an annual visitor, told me, “They always seem to begin by finding exactly the right playing style for each piece of music—the kind of sound, the kind of phrasing, breathing, attacks, colors, the indefinable whole. That shouldn’t be unusual, but it is.” Adams calls the Philharmonic “the most Amurrican of orchestras. They don’t hold back and they don’t put on airs. If you met them in twos or threes, you’d have no idea they were playing in an orchestra, that they were classical-music people.”
One day, I followed Ben Hong, the assistant principal cellist, as he went about his daily duties. A shaggy-haired thirty-eight-year-old who commutes on a motorcycle, he has been playing in the Philharmonic since he was twenty-four. He arrived at the hall at 9 A.M. to coach two students in a studio in the building. One of them was working on Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and Hong, after working through issues of bowing and phrasing, tried to get his student to think about the piece in terms of “lost innocence” and the legacy of war.
Just before eleven, Hong reported to the main floor of Disney to play a matinée concert. The program consisted of Brahms’s First and Third Symphonies, under the direction of Christoph von Dohnányi, who was visiting for two weeks. “We’ll sell some tickets,” Borda said of this concert in advance. “Plus, it will be good for the orchestra. Christoph will pick everything to pieces, rehearse in great detail, go back to basics.”
After the concert, Hong had lunch with a few younger players: Eric Overholt, who has been playing French horn in the orchestra only since the beginning of the year; Ariana Ghez, the principal oboist, who also started this season; and Joana Carneiro, the assistant conductor. They talked about the audition process (“It’s pretty brutal, probably the most difficult thing you have to do as a musician,” Hong said); the limits of a conservatory education (Ghez studied English at Columbia alongside music at Juilliard); and the intellectual excitement of playing new works such as “Naïve and Sentimental Music,” which the Philharmonic has recorded for Nonesuch. Some orchestra veterans have never relished Salonen’s favored diet of twentieth-century and contemporary fare, but the younger musicians tend to cite it as one of the main attractions of the job. Ghez noted that older listeners no longer run for the exits when a little Ligeti appears on one of the regular programs. Instead, she said, they have been trained to say things like “I guess you have to take it like a Jackson Pollock.”
Hong has been thinking more deeply about the gaps in his conservatory training, and wondering what he might learn from other kinds of music-making. In particular, he’s become interested in improvisation. After lunch, he drove up some twisting roads in the Laurel Canyon area to the home of Lili Haydn, a session violinist, singer-songwriter, and former child actress, who has been giving him guidance on how to improvise in a semi-jazz, semi-Indian style. This activity falls far outside his usual work with the orchestra, although it fits into the expanded mission of Salonen’s Philharmonic, improvisation having a role in much avant-garde music after the Second World War and in quite a bit of alternative-minded contemporary work.
Hong joined Haydn in her studio, which was outfitted with wall hangings and antique lamps. There was a faint smell of incense. First, they worked on a track that will appear on Haydn’s forthcoming album. She sang, “We all saw the water sweep the streets with the force that carried Noah.” Hong played a doleful, arpeggiated accompaniment. Then the two improvised for twenty minutes or so over an Indian tamboura drone. Hong seemed hesitant at first, locking himself into a repeating figure or indulging in rapid up-and-down scales that seemed exterior to the mood.
“Find the magic in the intervals,” Haydn told him. She urged him to take hold of a figure of two or three notes, bend it this way and that against the regular rhythm, and then savor the effect of adding one more note. Hong promptly took off on a moody minor-key flight that sounded a little like the cello lines in Sibelius’s “Swan of Tuonela” and, for a minute or two, became lost in music of his own invention.
He said at one point, “After a few sessions, I’m hearing things in a different way. I am feeling the nuances of each note in a more intense way. It’s like when I was growing up—they’d say that you must chew each mouthful of rice seventy-two times to really taste the sweetness of the rice. There’s something to that. Sometimes in classical music that’s lost. This has taught me to be more appreciative of each note.”
Hong deftly related all this back to the Brahms he had played that morning. He launched into an exceptionally free, rich rendition of the grand chromatic line that soars slowly through the orchestra at the beginning of the First Symphony, giving each note a slightly different color and weight. He stopped at the topmost B-flat, letting the note float out over the canyon.
To spend time with a creative-minded musician like Hong is to realize that the effect of a conductor on an orchestra is easily overstated: the L.A. Philharmonic is the sum of a hundred distinct personalities. Salonen knows this as well as anyone; as a youth, he was skeptical of his future profession. “I had no great desires of becoming a conductor,” he says. “In fact, I thought conductors were disgusting. I very much disliked this image of a conductor like Herbert von Karajan, riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, conducting ‘Ein Heldenleben.’ I thought that was really bad. I still do, actually. I thought that conductors get so much attention for almost no reason and the really important guy, i.e., the composer, is the worst-paid one and the one who always stays in the worst hotel and is kicked on the head by everybody else, and I thought that was rotten. I still do, actually.”
For several years, Salonen had been making semi-public noises about leaving the Philharmonic. He had set himself various goals—to move into the new hall, to find an artistic vision befitting Gehry’s space, to elevate the orchestra’s playing, to cultivate its financial health. “Bit by bit,” he told me, “all this started to become reality.” He had thought of stepping away after the opening of Disney Hall, but he couldn’t yet give up the heady experience of conducting in that space. “I thought, This is too much fun. It felt like the harvesting time. There also was a new level to the relationship with the orchestra. I quite often felt as though they were reading my mind—they would do something just as I was vaguely thinking of it. A lot of warmth and good feeling on both sides.” Still, even when he’s on a break he senses the obligations of the job pressing on him—not so much the conducting itself, which comes easily, as the dozens of other issues waiting to be addressed. (His future position at the Philharmonia, a self-governing orchestra with a much smaller infrastructure, requires him to conduct and not much else.)
Last spring, while Minimalist Jukebox was unfolding in L.A., Salonen was in Paris, leading the world première of the opera “Adriana Mater,” by his old schoolmate Kaija Saariaho. In Paris, Salonen started making sketches for a Piano Concerto, which the New York Philharmonic had commissioned from him. Work proceeded in fits and starts over the summer and through the fall, and the score was finally finished over Christmas. As he reluctantly stole away from his family into his studio, he felt more acutely the need to give up the directorship of the orchestra.
The concerto was written for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, one of Salonen’s closest friends and a master interpreter of the concertos of Rachmaninoff. Salonen was determined to confront the legacy of the old-school Romantic concerto; he came up with a voluptuous, virtuosic piece, full of cascading double octaves, wide-spanning chords, plush impressionist harmony, and, at the end of the second movement, a certifiable Big Tune. At the same time, the musical language feels very up to date, full of bopping rhythms, trickily shifting beats, alarms and noises, malfunctioning machine patterns, and a fabulously eerie section that Salonen characterizes as “Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds.” In a lively program note, he connects that last episode to a “post-biological culture where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore.” Despite such programmatic idiosyncrasies, or perhaps because of them, it’s a convincing reinvention of the Romantic concerto, and Salonen’s most assured work to date.
Bronfman had to learn the solo part in a few weeks, and initially he grumbled about its finger-twisting difficulty. (Subconscious feelings of guilt may have produced a cryptic dream that the composer reported having one night, in which Bronfman was falsely accused of the murder of the actress Helen Mirren.) Salonen conducted the première himself, appearing with the New York Philharmonic for the first time since 1986. The orchestra, which has been making deliberate strides toward being a more modern institution, was friendly and coöperative. The audience responded with more wholehearted enthusiasm than is normal for a New York subscription-series première. An elderly couple was observed holding hands during the slow movement.
Afterward, Salonen was more confident about his choice to step down. “I felt that this is the way to go,” he later told me. “Now I’m ready for the next project.” He has long talked of writing an opera, and may finally go through with it. He is also planning a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra, possibly based on Joseph Brodsky’s final poetry collection, “So Forth.” Some lines from the Brodsky poem “New Life” seem relevant: “Ultimately, one’s unbound / curiosity about these empty zones, / about these objectless vistas, / is what art seems to be all about.”
The Philharmonic players were keenly interested in the question of who might come next. “We’re cresting a wave—it’s just amazing,” Meredith Snow, a member of the viola section, told me in January. “The transition from Salonen scares us. But it feels like our management is really looking out for that.”
I asked Snow and David Allen Moore, a double-bass player, which conductors had made a good impression, and a relatively short list of names emerged. “There’s such a vacuum,” Snow said. “We’re so desperate for the quality of honesty. At least in this orchestra, there’s no baggage of people prejudging conductors. It’s, like, ‘Please be good.’ We’ll participate if you show us what you want, emotionally and musically.”
Dudamel’s name was the first one they mentioned. “He was great,” Snow said. “He has it all. This orchestra was on fire with him.”
Moore added, “It’s not just about a mythical being on the podium who by his own will makes everything somehow happen. It’s not so much about the cult of personality of the maestro anymore. Esa-Pekka clearly has a strong personality and all that, but with him it definitely feels more collaborative.”
Borda had observed how other orchestras underwent protracted searches for new music directors, replete with internal politicking for one conductor or another, speculation and second-guessing in the press, hurt feelings as renowned musicians were reported to have “not gone over well” with the players, and so on—all the result of the empowerment of musicians as adjudicators in recent decades. She decided to do a “stealth search,” gathering evaluations and reviewing them with the Artistic Liaison Committee. The musicians would have a say, only they wouldn’t quite know it.
Some players were already chattering excitedly about Dudamel’s future with the orchestra after his very first rehearsal as guest conductor, in 2005, at the Hollywood Bowl. “I was tempted to go for him right then,” Borda says. “But I wouldn’t do that.” Instead, over the next year and a half, she regularly travelled to hear Dudamel conduct, getting to know him and his wife, Eloísa, and commandeering his schedule with various projects. Somehow, she managed to do this without attracting undue notice from music-industry professionals. “I’m quite short,” she joked.
All this wouldn’t have mattered if Dudamel hadn’t won over the players when he returned to conduct in January, in a program of Kodály, Rachmaninoff, and Bartók. Halfway through the first piece, Salonen, who was sitting in the audience, leaned over to his wife and whispered, “This is the man.” The contract was signed at the end of March in Lucerne, where Dudamel was on tour. “We did it about two in the morning someplace,” Borda told me, relishing the cloak-and-dagger aspect of the operation. “I don’t think anybody knew, even with the crème de la crème of the European managers dancing attendance.”
Dudamel’s contract is for five years. “Someday he may go on to be the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic,” Borda says. “But I’m not going to worry about that. We have a tradition of people starting young, staying for a long time, and then going on to the next thing. Part of what we do here is we’re nimble.”
The incoming music director was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1981. His father played trombone in a salsa band. He studied music from an early age, learning the basics of notation and theory before he took up an instrument, the violin, at the age of ten. He showed an interest in composition, and, at one of his early conducting gigs, at the age of fifteen, he led his own Trombone Concerto. Conducting quickly took over, and by his late teens he was leading ninety concerts a year with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, the chief ensemble in Venezuela’s youth-ensemble system. Venezuela has a music-education system unmatched by any in the world; since the seventies, the composer José Antonio Abreu has been building up an organization called the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela, or El Sistema. There are now two hundred and fifty thousand students in the system. Abreu has managed to maintain support for his system through various regimes, including that of Hugo Chávez.
Having won notice at the Bamberg competition in 2004, Dudamel found himself in the tricky position of being hailed as a savior of classical music. It only added to the furor that he was a non-Caucasian face in an industry suffering from the appearance of élitism. Last year, Deutsche Grammophon recorded him leading Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies with the youth orchestra. My first reaction to the disk was skeptical; the interpretations were expertly handled, but there was nothing obviously extraordinary about them.
What the recording didn’t reveal was the electricity that crackles around Dudamel in performance. Just before his Philharmonic appointment was announced, he conducted a program with the Chicago Symphony that included Mahler’s First Symphony, and I stopped over on my way to L.A. to hear it. The conductor made smart choices throughout, managed tempo changes fluidly, shaped phrases with an idiomatic hand. At every turn, though, the players responded with unusual intensity, until the performance became an event. As Salonen told me, “He lets music be what it is, but somehow puts it on fire in some mysterious way.” Dudamel did not seem to be outside the music, imposing his ideas on it; instead, he appeared captive to it. During the coda of the Mahler, he jumped around with a boyish, Bernstein-like glee that would have appeared a bit ridiculous if you weren’t also hearing the majestic roar of the orchestra in front of him.
A huge ovation greeted Dudamel at Chicago’s Symphony Hall. More than a few people in the hall—including members of the orchestra—may have believed that he could be their next conductor. In fact, he was about to fly to Los Angeles. Late the following day, he looked around the Disney stage and conferred with Borda in her office. The story had broken in the Los Angeles Times that morning, and people were already congratulating him; several of the guards offered greetings in Spanish.
Dudamel is a warm, exuberant young man, and he responded to every well-wisher with a torrent of phrases along the lines of “It is wonderful,” “This is so special,” and “I am so happy for this big opportunity.” His English is not yet fluent, but he expressed himself gracefully, wittily, and, when necessary, with artful vagueness. He deflects questions about Chávez, apologizing for being “politically disconnected.” When I asked him about his intentions with the Philharmonic, he said that he needed to gain more experience with the orchestra and its repertory before he could think about programming. He said that he had long admired Salonen. When he was eleven, his mother bought him the conductor’s recording of Stravinsky’s “Rite” and Symphony in Three Movements, and he was amazed to find such a “very young conductor” leading a major orchestra. “Oh, my God, who is this guy? From that time he was an idol for me.” When Dudamel repeated that anecdote at the press conference, Salonen looked suitably embarrassed.
Most of L.A.’s television stations sent reporters and cameras, their coverage revealing that after fifteen years the local announcers still can’t pronounce the music director’s name (“Ee-ssa-peeka,” “Salanon”). The orchestra’s press office fielded calls from the “Tonight Show” and Al Jazeera. Dudamel appeared healthily detached from the attention. At the press conference, when Salonen introduced him with an uncharacteristically florid fanfare—“We are interested in the future. We are not trying to re-create the glories of the past, like so many other symphony orchestras”—Dudamel got a laugh by advancing to the microphone, pausing for a long moment, and saying, “So-o-o-o . . .” The art of understatement isn’t dead at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Afterward, Salonen sat in his office, a cool, quiet space within Disney’s curving walls. He was looking for words that would express in a not too sentimental or clichéd way the idea that he had decided to take the plunge, follow his dream, reject the beaten path. “I’m approaching fifty,” he told me. “And, going by the sort of ten-year chunks by which we measure our lives, even if I behave, the number of decades available is sadly limited. Bill Viola sent me an e-mail this morning saying that there is an old Bulgarian proverb: If you decide to kill yourself by drowning, don’t do it in shallow waters.”
Several times in the preceding weeks, Salonen had touched on the theme of growing older. At his Apple Store event, he had said, “At this point, my feeling is that somebody will conduct concerts, no question, but only I can write my music, for better or worse. And we’re not getting younger, necessarily.” In a radio interview, he proposed that people in their thirties and forties might be rediscovering classical music because “you realize that your time is not unlimited, that there might be an end to all this, and that life is too short to be wasted on things that are not quality.”
That morning, Salonen had surprised his colleagues by showing up in a cerulean sports jacket. He habitually dresses in a black T-shirt and black jeans, and no one could recall him wearing color. This was an inside joke for the orchestra, he explained to Smith. At his first rehearsal as music director, everyone had dressed in black in homage to him, and, in those shoe-gazing days, he had to have the joke pointed out.
Salonen described what had happened on Saturday after he told the orchestra he was leaving. Drained by the experience, he sat in his office alone. (Ben Hong reported that the speech had been “really heartfelt, one of the few times he’s been emotional.”) Borda stopped by, and they shared a vodka. Then she went off to attend to business. As he was preparing to leave, his assistant buzzed him, saying that a small group of the musicians were outside the door. He invited them in and chatted for a while. There was another buzz: more musicians had arrived, fortified by a trip to a nearby bar.
“It became like a sort of mini-party,” Salonen said. “I don’t know what goes on in other orchestras, but it really felt extremely personal and extremely unique.” Well into the evening, he finally went home to his wife and children, one more free man in California. ♦
