Salonen Announces Philharmonic’s 74th Season : Music: Orchestra’s incoming music director will be on the podium 13 of 29 weeks. ‘My first season does not contain as much contemporary music as I hoped.’

For his first season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic beginning this fall, Esa-Pekka Salonen will be on the podium for 13 of 29 weeks. Reflecting the composer-conductor’s eclectic tastes, his programs will range from Haydn to Ligeti.

The Philharmonic’s 74th season also features one world premiere and a number of first U.S. and Los Angeles performances. The season will also offer with familiar guest artists and conductors, some in their Music Center debuts.

Calling the season’s repertory eclectic, and comparing it to California cuisine, Salonen acknowledged that variety in programming is necessary, since conducting “is a public-service profession.”

“It’s very embarrassing that my first season does not contain as much contemporary music as I hoped,” the 33-year old Finnish musician commented at a Music Center press conference Tuesday. He explained that “financial considerations” were usually the cause of “these decisions.”

The winter concert-year in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center is slated to begin Oct. 5, with a Salonen-led performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony. It will close May 30, 1993, when guest conductor Lawrence Foster is scheduled to preside over a program of Mozart’s Symphony No. 28 and D-minor Piano Concerto, and concluding with the first Philharmonic performance of the neglected Symphony No. 1 by Enesco.

Also scheduled to lead the orchestra during the winter series will be guest conductors Zubin Mehta, Yuri Temirkanov, Simon Rattle and Lawrence Foster (each for two weeks), and Oliver Knussen, Kurt Sanderling, David Zinman, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Witold Lutoslawski, Andrew Davis, Enrique Diemecke, and Mark Elder (one week each).

Among the soloists will be singers Birgitta Svenden, Maria Ewing, Sylvia McNair, Elise Ross and Willard White; violinists Cho-Liang Lin, Itzhak Perlman, Viktoria Mullova, Maxim Vengerov and Saschko Gawrilav, Alexander Treger, Christian Tetzlaf and Sidney Weiss, and pianists Peter Serkin, Stephen Hough, Lars Vogt, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Peter Donohoe and Artur Pizarro.

Repertory for Salonen’s concerts will include premieres of works by Lerdahl (“Cross Currents”), Saariaho (“A la fumee”), Ligeti and Roger Reynolds, as well as symphonies by Schumann, Berwald, Stravinsky, Haydn, Nielsen and Beethoven; concertos by Liszt, Prokofiev, Schumann, Ligeti, Berg, Dvorak, Sibelius and Bartok; Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler,” and Debussy’s “La Damoiselle Elue” and “Le Martyre de St. Sebastien.”

The season’s programs as co-announced by Managing Director Ernest Fleischmann contain only one “to-be-announced” agenda, that one scheduled for the week of May 3-10. Salonen said that he is now planning that program with the Philharmonic’s creative consultant, Peter Sellars,.

Salonen, responding to a question that his eclectic programs generously sprinkled with contemporary music might be more attractive to younger concertgoers than to veteran subscribers, said: “I don’t want to exclude anybody. But if young people like my programs, I’m happy.”