Download Esa-Pekka Salonen Long Bio 2012-2013

Esa-Pekka Salonen – long bio
(1567 words)
As both a lauded composer and a world-renowned conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen has a
restless innovation that marks him as one of the most important artists in classical music. The
Boston Globe has said that he displays "a kind of complete musicianship rarely encountered
today.” Salonen is currently the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor for London’s
Philharmonia Orchestra and the Conductor Laureate for the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009. The 2014-15 season will find him as the
first-ever Creative Chair at the Tonhalle Zurich Orchestra, which has commissioned a new
piece for orchestra and chorus from him and will perform nine other Salonen pieces
throughout the season. His Floof and LA Variations have become established modern classics,
and new compositions continue to be performed around the globe.
Trained in the austere world of European modernism and enjoying a close relationship with
the sunny city of Los Angeles, Salonen composes works that move freely between
contemporary idioms, combining intricacy and technical virtuosity with playful rhythmic and
melodic innovations. Three major retrospectives of Salonen's original work have been heard
by capacity audiences and received critical acclaim: at Festival Présences Paris in 2011, at the
Stockholm International Composer Festival in 2004, and at Musica Nova, Helsinki in 2003.
Salonen has written many works for symphony orchestra, including Foreign Bodies (2001),
commissioned by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Insomnia (2002), co-commissioned
by Suntory Hall, Tokyo, and Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Hamburg, and Wing on Wing, which
received its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004 and was a gift from the
composer to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in honor of their new home. In 2007 Salonen
conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of his Piano Concerto,
dedicated to Yefim Bronfman, who also premiered it. Salonen’s Violin Concerto, which
premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Leila Josefowicz in 2009, won the 2012
University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and was released along
with Salonen’s Nyx on Deutsche Grammophon in 2012. In 2015 Nyx will receive its UK
premiere from Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic at the Barbican Centre. In spring
2014, the Violin Concerto was the inspiration for an international ad campaign for iPad,
which featured Salonen as composer and conductor, Leila Josefowicz, and the Philharmonia.
The campaign ran for several months and included a new recording of the Violin Concerto,
mastered at Abbey Road.
Salonen opens the 2014-15 season with a performance of Berlioz's Requiem with the
Philharmonia Orchestra, will tour extensively throughout Europe and Japan with the
Philharmonia, and will lead the “City of Light: Paris 1900-1950” festival as the thematic focus
of the season. Throughout their relationship, Salonen and the Philharmonia have curated
landmark multi-disciplinary projects like this: together, they marked the centenary of the
birth of Witold Lutoslawski, Salonen's mentor, with Woven Words: "Music begins where words
end,” and created the award-winning RE-RITE installation, which was first exhibited in
London in 2009 and has since travelled to Portugal, China, Turkey, Germany, and Austria.
The digital residency allows members of the public to conduct, play, and step inside the
Philharmonia Orchestra with Salonen through high-definition audio and video projections of
musicians performing The Rite of Spring. Their follow-up installation, Universe of Sound, which
was based on Holst’s The Planets, debuted at London’s Science Museum and won the 2012
Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Audiences and Engagement. Salonen and the
Philharmonia Orchestra, in partnership with Music Sales Group, Rite Digital, and
Touchpress, released a successful iPad app, The Orchestra. Slate called the interactive tour
through orchestral history, which allows the user unprecedented access to the internal
workings of eight symphonic works, “the perfect classical music app.”
Salonen performs frequently as a guest conductor of the world’s top orchestras. During the
2014-15 season, he will make appearances with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the New York Philharmonic, the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra for a
Hillborg celebration. Salonen is also an enthusiastic conductor of operatic works. In July 2013,
he led an anticipated new production of Strauss' Elektra directed by Patrice Chéreau at the
Aix-en-Provence Festival. Chéreau and Salonen previously collaborated on Janácek's From the
House of the Dead in 2009 at the Metropolitan Opera, which The New York Times described as "a
milestone." This season, he will direct Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande with the Philharmonia
Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges in Chicago,
London, Stockholm, and Paris.
As the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years, Salonen is widely
credited with revitalizing the organization and bringing the idea of the symphony orchestra
into the 21st century. As Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote, "Salonen turned the Los Angeles
Philharmonic into the most intellectually lively orchestra in America. … the metamorphosis
of the Philharmonic was Salonen’s doing, and he thereby gained a place among the visionary
conductors of American musical history." During his tenure, Salonen was instrumental in
helping the orchestra to open their famed Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank
Gehry. Salonen also presided over countless premieres of contemporary work; began the EsaPekka Salonen Commissions Fund; made the Los Angeles Philharmonic one of the best
attended and funded orchestras in the country; and became, in the words of the Los Angeles
Times, an "open, communicative, imaginative artist—among the most beloved of our town
and time." The many unique festivals and collaborations under his leadership of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic included a production of Saint François d'Assise at the Salzburg Festival
(1992) and a Stravinsky Festival together with Pierre Boulez at the Théâtre du Châtelet in
Paris (1996). This season Salonen returns to Los Angeles to conduct works by Janácek,
Saariaho, Sibelius, Mozart, Beethoven, and a program featuring émigré composers with
Amériques by Varèse as its highlight.
Salonen has an extensive recording career. An album of Henri Dutilleux's Correspondances,
recorded with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in the presence of the
composer, was released in 2013 on Deutsche Grammophon on the composer’s 97th birthday.
Also that month, Sony completed a recording project that began with Salonen and the Los
Angeles nearly 30 years ago: a 2-disc set of the orchestral works of Lutosławski, released in
what would have been the composer’s 100th year. In 2012 he recorded a disc of Saariaho's
Passion De Simone with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Dawn Upshaw. Salonen’s
Violin Concerto and his orchestral work Nyx were released on Deutsche Grammophon with
Leila Josefowicz and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2012. Deutsche Grammophon
has also released a portrait CD of Salonen’s orchestral works performed by the Finnish Radio
Symphony Orchestra and conducted by the composer, as well as a CD with Salonen's Piano
Concerto and his works Helix and Dichotomie. The latter, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
and Yefim Bronfman, was nominated for a Grammy in 2009. A CD of five of his orchestral
works is available on Sony. 2012 saw the release of the first-ever recording of Shostakovich's
previously undiscovered opera prologue Orango with the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
conducted by Salonen, on Deutsche Grammophon. In 2009 a new collaboration with the
Philharmonia Orchestra's partner label, Signum, was launched with the release of a live
recording of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder; other recent recordings with the Philharmonia on
Signum include Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Mahler's sixth and ninth symphonies.
Salonen's 2008 recording of Schoenberg's Violin Concerto and Sibelius' Violin Concerto with
Hilary Hahn and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra won a Grammy Award. On
Deutsche Grammophon, Salonen's recordings include a DVD of Kaija Saariaho's opera
L'Amour de Loin, with the Finnish National Opera, as well as two CDs with Hélène Grimaud
featuring works by Pärt and Schumann. His first recording with the Los Angeles
Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon—Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the first CD recorded
at Walt Disney Concert Hall—was nominated for a Grammy in 2007.
Salonen is the recipient of many major awards, including the UNESCO Rostrum Prize for his
composition Floof in 1992, and the Siena Prize, given by the Accademia Chigiana in 1993; he is
the first conductor ever to receive it. In 1995 he received the Royal Philharmonic Society's
Opera Award and two years later, the society's Conductor Award. Salonen was awarded the
Litteris et Artibus medal, one of Sweden's highest honors, by the King of Sweden in 1996. In
1998 the French government awarded him the rank of Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des
Lettres. Salonen was also honored with the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of
Finland. In 2003 the Sibelius Academy in Finland gave him an honorary doctorate, and two
years later Salonen won the Helsinki Medal. Most recently he was honored with the 2014
Nemmers Composition Prize, which will include a residency at the Henry and Leigh Bienen
School of Music at Northwestern University and a performance by the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra. To date, Salonen has received seven honorary doctorates in four different
countries. Musical America named him its Musician of the Year in 2006, and he was elected an
honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. He is Artistic
Director and cofounder of the Baltic Sea Festival, an event that annually invites celebrated
orchestras, conductors, and soloists to promote unity and ecological awareness among the
countries around the Baltic Sea.
esapekkasalonen.com
@esapekkasalonen
https://www.facebook.com/esapekkasalonen
Management by Fidelio Arts: fidelioarts.com
Public Relations by First Chair Promotion: firstchairpromo.com
Publishing by Chester Music Ltd: musicsalesclassical.com
(As of September 8, 2014)
Not to be altered without permission. Please destroy all previous biographical material.