Esa-Pekka Salonen joins that blog generation

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Looks like Culture Monster’s got competition, and from an Angeleno no less. But at least an Angeleno in London.

Esa-Pekka Salonen -- who begins his final season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic this week and talks about his nearly quarter-century relationship with the orchestra in today’s Times -- has also just begun his first season as principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. And he has begun blogging for the Philharmonia’s website.

In his first -- and so far only -- post, he reflects on his farewell Hollywood Bowl concert as Philharmonic music director, in which he conducted a spellbinding performance of Mahler’s humongous Eighth Symphony:

An image that will stay with me for a long time: After the last massive E-flat chord has sounded, I can see a couple standing in their box and shouting, ‘Don’t leave!’ Beyond what a gesture like that means to me personally, I’d like to see it from a larger perspective: This kind of music, the classical music (what an awful term it is) still has immense power. It is not some marginal relic from another era, but something very much alive -– maybe more so than ever!

--Mark Swed