Enter the New Music Director : COMMENTARY

The Los Angeles Philharmonic can breathe easy again. The audience can relax. We have a music director.

The envelope, please. The winner is. . . (dramatic pause) . . . Esa-Pekka Salonen.

If all goes as planned, the appointment will become official this morning.

Surprise?

Not really.

He was a likely choice. Also a lucky choice, and a good choice. This man looks like the right man in the right place at the right time.

Actually, he doesn’t look like a man. He looks like a boy. Don’t let that fool you. He just turned 31.

He is mature. He is smart. He is imaginative. He is a solid technician.

It was no secret that he was a prime contender all along. He has been a fair-haired visitor--literally and figuratively--ever since he made his U.S. debut here in 1984, at the dewy age of 26. Still, some of us worried that, like Simon Rattle, he might not want to take the job.

Salonen, after all, is very much in demand these days, in places even more glamorous and more prestigious than Los Angeles. He is immensely gifted, compellingly theatrical, strikingly versatile and undeniably attractive. (Do we really have to call him charismatic ?)

He wasn’t pleased, we hear, when the Philharmonic had to withdraw a tour that Ernest Fleischmann, the managing director, had promised him--without bothering to consult Andre Previn. It turned out at the time that all official tours were the music director’s prerogative.

Understandably miffed, Previn objected to being bypassed on his own turf. This, no doubt, was an example of the managerial interference that he cited as the reason for his resignation.

Understandably miffed, Salonen pulled out of his commitment to serve as principal guest conductor here. It was feared that he might hold a grudge and chose permanently to take his business elsewhere.

Instead, he has opted for the last laugh. It should be a beneficial laugh.

He will no doubt bring energy to the task at hand. He probably will be able to galvanize an audience teetering on the brink of indifference. He just may be sufficiently persuasive as a podium personality to make our essentially conservative public sit up and listen to new music.

“The historical period of orchestral music is so short,” he has said, “I do almost everything.”

Everything, in this case, embraces the so-called standard repertory, the much-neglected output of his Scandinavian ancestors and the avant-garde that Previn tended to neglect. Salonen takes nothing for granted.

“We must find new visions for classical works,” he once told an interviewer, “otherwise they’ll lose their dynamic, and that’s fatal.”

He made his big breakthrough with the Mahler Third, which he conducted in London at five days’ notice as an unknown replacement for Michael Tilson Thomas. Often, however, he favors contemporary pieces that the subscribers can’t hum. Most of the subscribers can’t even pronounce the composers’ names.

“Everybody keeps telling me,” he has written, “that I program such adventurous repertoire--for instance, when I play music by Messiaen and Lutoslawski. Yet my relation timewise to Messiaen and Lutoslawski is almost exactly as (Herbert von) Karajan’s (was) to Richard Strauss. And I don’t think anyone thought that Karajan was an outrageous avant-gardist when he played Strauss.”

Healthy thinking.

At this juncture, we do not know how much time Salonen intends to devote to Los Angeles. We hope it will be a generous portion. The city and the maestro could do some happy maturing together.

We don’t yet know the length of his contract. It should be long. It would be useful to have Salonen around as the Philharmonic moves across the street into its new Disneyesque home.

We don’t know how the music director-elect will get along with Fleischmann--who is either the saintly savior of musical culture in the Western Hemisphere or a greasy fusion of Iago, Machiavelli and Attila the Hun, depending on whom you ask.

It is obvious, however, that Fleischmann supports Salonen--at the moment. The impresario credits himself, to a degree, with having discovered the conductor. If mutual admiration can survive the inevitable vicissitudes, abrasions and ego clashes backstage at the Music Center, the working relationship between the vital young maestro and tough but crafty old manager could be fruitful.

Los Angeles hasn’t yet had a chance to live with Salonen. His visits have been relatively frequent but regrettably brief. There are still some things that we do not know about him. But we love a mystery.

Interesting times lie ahead. Crucial times. Precarious times. Promising times. . . .

Salonen’s meteoric career: Page 5

Past Philharmonic music directors: Page 4