The Maestro of Change : He’s Young, He’s Marketable and He’s Brash--but Will L.A. Follow Where Esa-Pekka Salonen Leads?

CHECK OUT THE BILLBOARD ON SUNSET BOULEVARD IN HOLLYWOOD, ACROSS the street from the looming Marlboro Man and around the corner from the Chateau Marmont. For a month this year it blared just one strange word: “ SLAP .” Then someone mercifully filled in the blanks, and the message became clear: “ S alonen LA and the P hil.” A soft-sell slogan materialized in smaller letters at the bottom: “music for a great city.” Now check out the brochure heralding the 1992-’93 season of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. At first, it looks like just another program schedule. But unfolded, it is transformed into a 21-inch full-color star-treatment poster of the orchestra’s new conductor. Baton in hand, sporting a black polo shirt, non-designer blue-jeans and a belt that dangles at his hip, the maestro exudes vigor, rigor and an undeniable element of sexy marketability. That’s the new Los Angeles Philharmonic image. And that’s the new leading man. Thirty-four-years old, Finnish born, with a name--and a face--that is hard to forget, Esa-Pekka Salonen might have been ordered from Central Casting. He is, as they say, a hot property.

Salonen is flamboyant, magnetic and, oh yes, enormously talented. His groupies (they do exist) like to liken him to Michael J. Fox. If he employed a public-relations agent (which really wouldn’t be his style), the press releases no doubt would call him charismatic. He cuts an imposing figure on the podium, commands a virtuosic baton technique and, when in charge,dares the observer--any observer-- not to pay attention.

As Salonen officially assumes his duties as music director of the Philharmonic at a quasi-gala opening Thursday night, he strikes most observers as the right man in the right place at the right time. His talent should aid a potentially first-rate orchestra dawdling on the brink of artistic doldrums. And his charisma should satisfy an institution that has long yearned for a resident Compelling Personality.

And what does the object of celebration and desire think about all the brouhaha surrounding his ascension?

“This is all completely new to me,” he admits--partly amazed, partly amused and partly embarrassed--over lunch between a rehearsal and a Hollywood Bowl performance. The venue is the poolside cafe of a posh Westwood hotel that has served as his temporary home. “I have never seen anything like that billboard before, let alone been the person on a billboard. It would be unthinkable in Europe.”

His allure, clearly, isn’t just superficial. He is serious, well-read and articulate in three, maybe four languages. Salonen speaks elegantly clipped, utterly fluent English in an accent that betrays more of his adopted London then his native Helsinki. And he is trying to keep the hype in perspective.

“I am pragmatic enough to accept attempts to sell myself for the greater good,” he allows, “but I don’t want it to go wrong. One of the dangers I see is that the Philharmonic is marketed by creating a cult on my person. It might work in the short term. People might be curious and come to see this fellow, but it wouldn’t help in establishing music in the culture. One of the problems of our time is that phenomena are not interesting enough. It always must be personality .” (He likes to speak in italics.)

Salonen seems ambivalent about his Los Angeles image. He knows that he is good at playing the role in which he has been cast: the brash, iconoclastic, tough young man. “I would rather be presented,” he concedes, “as a scar-faced partisan of new music, of resistance and anarchy than as a powdered fellow stepping out of a Gucci shop.”

There is a gap in the popular perception of classical music, Salonen explains. “Young people see sissy conductors in stupid posters and think, ‘This is nothing for me.’ ”

Is this the same man who decided that the Philharmonic musicians looked too casual performing in their tuxedos and ordered that they wear formal tails from now on?

He likes paradoxes, he says as he squints off into the smog. He likes doing the unexpected.

“What music needs,” he says, looking deceptively boyish, his icy blue eyes flashing innocence, his puckish grin signaling something akin to mischief, “is a sense of danger.”

SALONEN LOOKS ALMOST AGGRESSIVELY UNPREPOSSESSING AS HE strolls onstage for a rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl. Unlike many a supermaestro, he comes without an entourage, attempts no grand entrance, strikes no poses. He mutters the briefest of greetings to his players, wastes no time on interpretive apologia. Precise and impeccably polite, he listens before he offers corrections, never raises his voice. He saves the flourishes for his performance. Salonen knows the score, be it hyper-familiar Beethoven or super-thorny Messiaen, and, more important, he knows what he wants to do with it. The beat tells it all.

“It is better,” this leader says, “for an orchestra to read the conductor than to listen to verbal translations of something that doesn’t always translate into language.”

So far, his followers have been very receptive. Patricia Heimerl, a bassoonist in the Philharmonic, finds Salonen “charismatic, a very good leader, a decision maker” and, perhaps most significant, “a respecter.” She says an orchestra makes up its mind about a new conductor during the first 10 minutes of their first session together. Some of her colleagues claim it takes less time--maybe 10 seconds.

“Esa-Pekka is a heck of a good conductor.” says Zita Carno, the orchestra’s veteran keyboardist. “He has a beat you can grab hold of. We have seen too many other kinds of conductors: the egg beater, the pizza flipper, the soup stirrer, the flat fish that just flounders around.”

The virtually unanimous chorus of approval from members of the Philharmonic, not normally prone to hero worship, produces quotes that read like the puffery in movie ads: “Esa-Pekka has all the virtues of youth, especially enthusiasm” (Roland Moritz, veteran flute). “As a composer, he conducts from a structural perspective . . . . He is much more of an old soul than a whiz kid” (Robert Watt, horn). “He conducts the orchestra, not the audience” (Tamara Chernyak, violin). “Spontaneity, incredible ear and second-nature baton technique” (Roy Tanabe, violin). “Wow” (Byron Peebles, trombone).

Michael Nutt, a stalwart among the second violins, was actually moved to tears when asked to describe Salonen’s impact on the orchestra at a meeting of the supportive ladies who lunch. Later, somewhat embarrassed by his emotionalism, he spoke of Salonen’s “personal human-ness, his expertise, charm and vivacity.”

The calmest, most revealing comments about Salonen, however, come from Salonen himself. Asked to describe his own strengths and weaknesses, he winces and sips some decaffeinated espresso.

“I’m quite a reliable guy,” he says. “Quite intense. I usually know what I am doing. I’m quite strong in certain areas. When it comes to the 20th Century, I feel quite comfortable with almost everything. The classical period is all right as well.

“I still need time to get confidence with the central German Romantic repertory--Schumann, Mendelssohn, Schubert. I’ve had very little experience with that repertory in general, and some things I have really screwed up in a spectacular way.” Not many music directors are sufficiently secure, or self-aware, to talk like that, even in the privacy of their own Jacuzzis.

“I conducted the worst Schubert Fifth in the world on a tour with the Stockholm Chamber Orchestra a couple of years ago,” Salonen volunteers. “I worried it to death. I knew it at the time. It sounded terrible. I did exactly the wrong things. It was like going in a car and starting to skid, then making things worse with sudden movements. I added more and more markings in the parts, more and more micro dynamics, organizing it to the point where everything was very interesting but there was no musical logic.

“I sometimes tend to over conduct,” he continues. “Sometimes I don’t give the orchestra enough room to breathe. They start feeling someone is chasing them. Being someone who likes danger, likes to take risks, I obviously make wrong judgments, but I don’t intend to give this up. What’s the use of not having the leeway to do right or wrong?”

Stage director Peter Sellars, another enfant terrible and Salonen’s collaborator at the Salzburg Festival this summer, puts a name to Salonen’s risk taking and acknowledges its value. Sellars calls it “the great no-fear factor.”

“Most people,” says Sellars, “look at a massively complex score and are frightened to death. Esa-Pekka looks calmly and lucidly and simply slices through it. There is no tension. He is open, relaxed, sunny. He has no hidden agenda. If he is interested in something, he nails it. If he isn’t interested, he lets you know. His presence is phenomenal, magnetic. He walks into a rehearsal involving a huge orchestra, chorus, soloists and technicians, and 700 people will do exactly what he wants. It is staggering.”

Salonen’s well-wishers--they seem to be virtually the only wishers he has--seem to worry only about three aspects of his Los Angeles tenure: his persuasiveness in the Romantic repertory; his zealotry in championing unfamiliar, potentially unpopular music, and, perhaps most crucial, his ability to coexist with the powerful, capable and notoriously egocentric executive vice president and managing director of the Philharmonic, Ernest Fleischmann.

Fleischmann sees no such problem. “With Esa-Pekka,” he raves, “never for a moment is there a sense of ‘how can I use this music to make me look good?’ It is always the other way around.”

But who will really be running the Philharmonic? “Esa-Pekka wants to run the show,” Fleischmann insists (perhaps too much), “and he is running the show. I love it. My job is to offer help, support, advice. He’s open, though he has very strong ideas. I am constantly astonished by the way he is able to cut through the guff even in managerial and political issues. I actually learn from him .”

For his part, Salonen doesn’t think he needs to apologize for performing contemporary composers (“My relation time-wise to Messiaen and Lutoslawski is almost exactly as Herbert von Karajan’s was to Richard Strauss”). Nor is he concerned about questions of the division of labor at the top (“Ernest does his job, and I do mine”). As for offending his public, he is more than willing to adopt a wait-and-see attitude.

Salonen remains quietly, characteristically sanguine as he confronts his risky future in Southern California. “Los Angeles is a lot more open-minded than lots of places in Europe,” he says reassuringly. “I wouldn’t have accepted this position unless I thought the audience was not stuffy, not prejudiced. For me, Los Angeles is not the provinces.”

IT IS PERHAPS FITTING THAT SALONEN’S FIRST BIG break on his way to becoming the Philharmonic’s leading man is classic Hollywood material. At 15, he became a horn and composition student at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. By 1981, he had turned his attention primarily to composition and conducting, training under specialists in Siena, Darmstadt and Milan. He made his conducting debut with the Finnish Radio Symphony in 1979 and soon broadened his activities, leading concerts and opera performances throughout Scandinavia. The dramatic turning point in his career came in 1983 when, virtually unknown in England, he agreed to replace the ailing Michael Tilson Thomas in a major concert with the London Philharmonia. The vehicle that fateful night was Mahler’s formidable, sprawling Symphony No. 3. Like Wagner’s Siegfried, Salonen at 25 had not yet learned the meaning of fear.

“A London agent came to see me while I was working in Copenhagen,” he recalls. “I had no great urge to be an internationally known conductor at the time. I have always been quite suspicious about conductors. As a composer, I had taken up conducting only because I wanted to be able to do my own stuff if necessary. But we reached some sort of agreement, and I soon forgot about the whole thing.

“Three months later, the phone rang. Michael had canceled. Would I like to conduct the Mahler Third? I had never seen the score, so I went to the library and looked through it. I said, ‘Well, maybe this is worth trying.’ At the time I thought of this just as a potentially interesting experiment. If it turns out not to be a major disaster, at least I could say I have conducted the Philharmonia once and go back to composing.”

Now Salonen looks back in terror. “That was five days before the concert and three before the first rehearsal. I had never studied the piece. I had never conducted the orchestra. It was dangerous, like diving into a pool where one didn’t know if there was water or not.”

There was plenty of water. Salonen’s resounding London success soon led to regular positions in Stockholm and Oslo, not to mention recording contracts and glamorous guest engagements with some of the leading orchestras in Europe.

There would be no turning back from the podium. He refused, however, to allow Salonen-the-conductor to overwhelm Salonen-the-composer. Even now, he carefully divides his professional time between his two callings. Most listeners find his colorful, often-witty compositions both orderly and accessible. Although the musical language--like the man--does not shrink from dissonance, it strives to balance the cerebral and the dramatic.

The Salonen saga began in a quiet, essentially bourgeois Finnish household. His father, now retired, was a Helsinki businessman. His mother was “mostly at home.” He was an only child. “I grew up thinking that everyone loves me,” he recalls. “Maybe I feel more naively positive than is deserved. Sometimes that backfires. I probably was spoiled.”

The most influential spoiler of his youth, he thinks, was his godfather, a former banker. “This wonderful old man, who died when I was 5, spent a lot of time with me. Being slightly gaga , he did not really understand that I was a child. He taught me to read when I was 3. That changed my life.”

His mother got him to start piano lessons a year later. “I didn’t want the piano. She was smart enough not to push. But I heard music a lot at home. At the mature age of 9--which is quite late, actually--I started with the recorder, a horrible instrument. Then I quickly changed to trumpet. Then I started French horn and then, finally, returned to the piano.”

For all his musical abilities, he was not a teacher’s delight. “I resisted authority, wanted to outsmart other people. I always had very good teachers. I also got a lot of support from my friends in a club of young composers. I was never lonely. We did our share of damage.”

Helsinki, he says, offered a nurturing environment. “Talent in a small city and a small country is concentrated. This is an advantage.”

But the close quarters also made him a target. When Salonen was 17 he got a chance to lead a student performance of Humperdinck’s “Hansel und Gretel.” Seppo Heikinheimo, the feisty senior critic of Finland’s largest daily, Helsinki Sanomat, heard the opera and predicted a great future for the conductor. Soon enough, however, Salonen and Heikinheimo became public antagonists.

“I was the local boy, and I have a big mouth,” explains Salonen, who also admits to having been “a pain in the ass” during his youth. Two years ago, he signed a petition denouncing the most powerful critic in Finland.

“Esa-Pekka most certainly is a domestic hero,” Heikinheimo concedes. “However, I am personally not quite as enthusiastic about him since he has called me a fathead in two interviews. We are, however, getting along perfectly fine. We do love this kind of humor to keep our blood going at our frozen shores.”

Fleischmann, who happened to be in the London audience when Salonen became a sudden sensation, signed him on the spot for his U.S. debut in Los Angeles the following year. The concert--a typically wide-ranging Salonen pro gram examining contemporary Lutoslawski, Impressionist Ravel and Romantic Mendelssohn--elicited extraordinary approval. Daniel Cariaga in The Times hailed the conductor’s “breadth, intense identification with each of the styles presented, unflagging energy and concentration,” and the audience demanded an encore. Fleischmann claims that it was then he decided that Salonen would be an ideal candidate to take over the orchestra. When, five years later, it came time to choose a successor for Andre Previn, Salonen was the first man in a line of one.

UNTIL THIS AUGUST, NEARLY EVERYONE--WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPtion of the man himself--believed that Salonen could do no wrong. Then, at the prestigious and generally conservative Salzburg Festival, he encountered some musical danger that he would have liked to avoid.

For more then three decades, Salzburg was the empire of Herbert von Karajan, a megalomaniac maestro who held court with a little help from Mozart and the Vienna Philharmonic. Oozing self-conscious Baroque charm, this Austrian mecca played summertime host primarily to wealthy Germans who liked their music and music-making slick, glamorous and emphatically unprovocative. After Karajan’s death in 1989, Salzburg surprised the music world by hiring Gerard Mortier, a progressive Belgian impresario, to sweep away the cobwebs.

Under Karajan, Salonen had never been invited to perform. (Nor, mein Gott , had an orchestra from the land of the plastic lotus.) “I wasn’t on the blacklist,” Salonen explains. “I was on the couldn’t-care-less list.” Mortier, however, wanted novelty--the foreign, the fresh and the unconventional. Salonen and the Philharmonic became his beneficiaries.

For his introductory program, Salonen chose a somewhat surprising, potentially incoherent, all-Austrian agenda. It began with a Johann Strauss waltz, hardly a standard offering for a “serious” concert in Austria and hardly the province of foreign invaders. The agenda shifted drastically with the discordant agonies of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, and ended with the folksy pathos of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.

A few members of the audience in Salzburg booed the waltz. The mood in the lavish Festspielhaus that Karajan built grew more positive with the Berg, and, although one could argue that Salonen over conducted the Mahler, the evening ended with a decent ovation. A victory of sorts seemed secure.

Most of the press, led by a Viennese contingent that longed for a Karajan clone, disagreed. The reviews didn’t just tend toward the negative. They tended toward the insulting. One headline proclaimed “Music from U.S. Drug Stores.” Another paper called the Strauss “a waltz for asthmatics.” Salonen was dismissed by the particularly hostile Vienna Kurier as a “prankish brat.”

Salonen isn’t one of those conductors who pretends not to read criticism. Between rehearsals the next day, he gulped a sandwich under a cafe umbrella during a characteristic Salzburg rainstorm and described his reaction. “These were pretty close to the worst reviews I ever got,” he said. “I was pissed off.”

He claimed that the negative response wasn’t totally unexpected. “I knew what I was doing when I took this program. I thought there might be some sort of reaction. Still, I was quite surprised. I even looked straight into the eyes of one guy in the third row who was booing. If I had it to do again, I’d bring the same program,” he said. Then he paused: “Maybe.”

He was alternately philosophical (“This sort of thing is part of one’s professionalism. The ultimate judge is history”) and defensive (“The tone of voice in the responses was very clearly anti-American. Someone here feels threatened, worried that perhaps the Vienna Philharmonic will lose some privileges”). He was also sufficiently shaken to worry about the reception for his next festival project, Olivier Messiaen’s mystical operatic marathon “Saint Francois d’Assise,” staged as a high-tech fantasy by Peter Sellars. “A few days ago, I would have said, ‘This is such a masterpiece and such a powerful production, it cannot be anything but a success.’ Now I am not so sure.”

In the end, the Philharmonic and its conductor triumphed, Sellars was trashed by the press, and the dangerous days in Salzburg seemed to make Salonen reluctantly defiant. “If (Salzburg has) a list of good guys and bad guys, and I end up on the bad-guys list together with Peter Sellars, I’d rather be on that side,” he had said testily, even before the Messiaen notices came in. And after a second, comparatively well-received, concert of Debussy, Bartok and Stravinsky, the notion of rebellion was nearly complete. “I suspect this trip cost Los Angeles something like $1 million,” Salonen calculated. “The question must be asked: ‘Is there a better way to spend this sort of money for the orchestra?’ ”

IN THE BAD OLD DAYS OF the Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta was usefully tough, an exotic firebrand. Carlo Maria Giulini, who followed him, was even better: mellow, introspective, a saintly old-school romantic.

Then came Andre Previn’s tenure, which was safe, sane and a bit dull. It ended in a much-publicized power struggle between the maestro and Ernest Fleischmann, which Previn lost.

Now it is Salonen’s turn. Youth is about to have its wild, presumably bountiful and inevitably picturesque fling. To officially open his tenure at the helm of the Philharmonic, Salonen has programmed the same monumental challenge that launched his international career in London a decade ago, the Mahler Third.

This seems a grandiose sentimental gesture from, and for, a musician not noted for emotional indulgences. One or two of Salonen’s associates actually complain from time to time, sotto voce , that he seems a bit cool. The accusation amuses the maestro. “Being a Finn, which is a mixture of East and West, I do have this sentimental side, underneath, which I try to hide.”

Salonen will continue to guest-conduct around the world, but Los Angeles will be his professional focus, at least for the three years of his contract, and if all goes well, probably beyond. He is beginning to adapt to life in Southern California.

Although he “didn’t want to contribute to worldwide pollution,” he has grudgingly, pragmatically, learned to drive a car. Now he tools the freeways in a new Mercedes borrowed from the Philharmonic. Last August Salonen married Jane Price, a former London Philharmonia violinist, and they became proud parents of a daughter, Ella Aneira, in May. They keep a home in London but have rented in Brentwood (he was “both amused and irritated” when he recently wanted to buy a six-pack at nearby Vicente Foods and the clerk demanded to see an ID).

He starts his new job with only a few caveats. He doesn’t love the cloudy acoustics or the stuffy ambience of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, but he does look forward to the innovations of Disney Hall, opening, it is hoped, in 1996, and is eagerly involved in its planning. He doesn’t love making music in the summertime in the wide open spaces of Hollywood Bowl, capacity 18,000, but appreciates its value (“The notion of serious music being good entertainment is not a poisonous worm . . . . I like the ambitious, more intellectual challenges, but the diet needs to be balanced”).

He also doesn’t love the amount of social, fiscal and administrative responsibility that comes with his job. “There is an enormous amount of extra-musical work here,” he says in tones that suggest the possibility of increasing exasperation. “Although I can do it, it doesn’t come naturally to me. It is always a real effort, and I always feel slightly uncomfortable.”

He is totally comfortable, of course, on the podium. That is where the shortish (according to Philharmonic observers, he stands 5-foot-8), mild-mannered intellectual turns into a looming, muscular Superman.

And that is where he hopes to court sufficient danger to fill the somnolent Music Center with intellectual and aesthetic excitement. Although he plans his share of relatively conventional programs with conventional formats, he also intends to increase Los Angeles’ exposure to the contemporary repertory--the “heady, gnarly, tough new music” that David Howard, a clarinetist in the orchestra, cites as his boss’s undoubted specialty.

Salonen is particularly eager to expand the activities of the New Music Group, a Philharmonic subsidiary that performs experimental programs at the Japan America Theatre under the shade of an enigmatic catch-all, “The Green Umbrella.” Ironically, cost containment has forced the management to cut that series from eight to four concerts a year, just as Salonen is taking over. “From my point of view,” he says, “that is very embarrassing. It is alarming. It’s my first season, and all of a sudden the contemporary (chamber) music is practically gone.”

Salonen is not one of those lofty musicians who believes that art can survive in a vacuum. He happens to be a moralist who endorses no organized religion (“When I was younger, I read St. Thomas Aquinas”). He endorses liberal politics. At home he gives money to Greenpeace (“They do heroic deeds”). And he worries about a distressing crescendo of societal problems.

Last spring, one of his L.A. concerts was canceled as the result of riot curfews. “At first I said, ‘Poor me,’ ” he remembers, “but it became really shattering after I put it into perspective. I had beautiful ideas about a multicultural society. I thought L.A. was the place where this could happen. Then, all of a sudden, it all falls to pieces. The multicultural situation is extremely tense, and the people are not happy. The system is not functioning.”

He sees the malfunction within the context of American politics, which he follows closely. “The mood of this country, as expressed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Quayle, affects my work directly. I think it is time to change things. Look what is happening with the National Endowment. It is another sign of bad times that such archetypal conservative ideas can have this much impact. I think we have had examples in not-very-distant history where the government and other official institutions have influenced the content of art. The arts should always be in the forefront, dealing with the future. If the power structure starts imposing rules on the arts, we are in trouble.

“The kind of statement Mr. Quayle makes, for instance, about intellectuals I found utterly pathetic, and calling the entertainment industry ‘intellectuals,’ is very strange.”

Later, fretting that his candor might hurt Philharmonic finances, he considers a retraction. “I am afraid some conservative sponsor might pull out and the orchestra will go bust.” Finally, he decides not to compromise his principles.

Salonen knows what is politically correct in the arts of the troubled ‘90s. With the assistance of Peter Sellars, now an official Philharmonic consultant, he wants to try some multicultural experiments. “By definition, we play mainly European and American white composers, trained in the mainstream of Western music. The question must be, how do we present it, where, and for whom?”

He toys with plans for programs that would offer surprising stylistic mixtures--”perhaps an evening combining Korean folk music with something by a Javanese gamelan ensemble, to be followed by a bit of Varese.”

So far, Ernest Fleischmann, the designated guardian of Philharmonic virtue, is eager to fall in behind Salonen’s unorthodox leanings: “I feel there is such overwhelming acceptance of Esa-Pekka as a conductor that our audience will trust him,” he says. But he also hedges the bet: “Of course, if there are wholesale defections, we will have to reconsider.”

Ultimately, Salonen may activate something of a musical revolution here. Under his guidance, the Philharmonic actually may become better at looking forward than backward. The prospect strikes Sellars as particularly healthy.

“If you really want to hear Beethoven,” the theatrical maverick says, “go hear Weingartner or Furtwangler. The task of our generation is to introduce new repertory, to let the repertory go forward. To perform our grandfathers’ repertory is really not that interesting.”

For keyboardist Zita Carno, one of the more progressive members of the orchestra, the prospect is not so dramatic. “The audience needs to have its ears stretched a little bit,” she says.

It is too early to predict how far Los Angeles will follow Salonen on the bumpy road to adventure. Even the conductor isn’t certain. “I don’t know whether we will find a new audience,” he once said, “or just lose this one.” He seemed to be only half-joking.

Danger ahead. Interesting danger.