O.C. Music : Salonen’s Flip Side : The L.A. Philharmonic Music Director Will Conduct His Own ‘Mimo II’

Although Esa-Pekka Salonen is best known as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the 36-year-old conductor originally planned to be a composer.

Conducting came into his life when Korvat Auki! (Open Ears!), the small student group he was part of at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, needed someone to direct new music.

Orange County audiences can sample both sides of his musical personality Saturday when Salonen leads the Philharmonic in his “Mimo II” in a program that also includes music by Mozart and Stravinsky.

“Mimo II” is Salonen’s reworking of a piece for oboe and piano called “Second Meeting” that he composed in 1992, the year he took over the Philharmonic.

He orchestrated the work several months after the premiere, keeping the oboe part “almost intact” but amplifying the piano part.

“The plan was to do the same kind of thing that Ravel did with ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin,’ ‘Mother Goose’ and all these things, in which actually he didn’t change a note but just orchestrated them as beautiful orchestra pieces,” Salonen said by phone recently from the back of a limo while being chauffeured home from a rehearsal in Los Angeles.

“In my case, it didn’t quite work that way because of the harmony. In the piano version, the harmony is centered on the middle register of the piano. And if you transmitted this for orchestra, then you get a very monochromatic sound. What I did, in reworking it, was I felt the harmony expand.”

The title is Italian for “mime” or “clown,” which Salonen alludes to in a program note for the piece:

“Imagine the face of a virtuoso, painted white, with facial expressions changing like shadows. Everything is acrobatic: the improbable shifts of the body and eloquent hand positions.

“Nothing is real: Joy is a picture of joy, and sorrow does not exist at all. Tightrope walkers are the greatest artists of all. They can give a less-than-perfect performance only once.”

“I was trying to say that the true professional actor or performer can switch between extremes of expression in a fraction of a second and convince us, and we are willing to be convinced, despite the fact that we know it’s not true. This is a very basic axiom on which all the performing arts are based.”

His 13-minute piece is scored for two flutes, English horn, two clarinets, solo oboe, harp, strings, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, trombone, tuba and a plethora of percussion instruments: bass drum, vibraphone, glockenspiel, marimba, congas, tam-tam, mark tree, triangle and celesta.

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But Salonen says the orchestra isn’t as large as that makes it sound.

“There are many percussion instruments, but not many players,” he said.

“It’s quite an economically conceived score. I tried to be practical as well. I have a certain experience about practicality at this point in my life. I didn’t want to waste resources.”

In writing the piece, Salonen departed from his previous method of composing.

“The way I conceived the form in this piece is something new for me personally, but it’s not new with a capital N ,” he said. “I used to conceive a general shape, then work out the details. Not in this piece. It’s exactly the other way. I started with the details, building larger forms out of the building blocks.

“It’s a difficult moment to sit down, stare at white paper and think, ‘Now I’m going to compose something.’ I try to avoid that kind of state. I jotted down these tiny, tiny things over the year, in airports, wherever. Finally I had a lot of material. Some was very bad, some (a little) bad and some was usable. I threw away a lot of stuff.

“Once I had enough of those, I literally threw them on the floor and started arranging them in various chains in order to find whether these could be built into phrases or not. Finally, after a few days, I found some.”

It was not, however, a John Cage-like experiment with chance.

“Actually, chance had very little to do with it,” Salonen said. “When the things are thrown on the floor, in what order they happen to fall is chance. But obviously I was reworking them. Finally, some things emerged that made sense. From then on, it was a conscious process.

“I had more fun this way than I used to have,” he added.

Technically, the piece consists of “variations on seven melodies or themes. But the separate identity of the themes is sometimes blurred. They sometimes dissolve into one, and sometimes they divide into several. It’s an amorphous situation.”

It makes virtuosic demands on the oboist.

“I like that sort of thing,” Salonen said. “Obviously there is no point in writing something that is impossible to play. Difficult, yes, but not mindless or meaningless difficulty.

“Everybody in the audience understands this (piece) is terribly hard. The difficulties in modern music often are hidden. (The musicians) are frying their brains trying to figure some rhythms, but that sort of complexity doesn’t communicate. For me, I’m more interested in the kind of virtuosity you can detect in the audience.”

In fact, Salonen is concerned about the audience “getting” the music.

“As almost everybody else has, I discovered that academic serialism has come to a dead-end, and something else has to be done,” he said. “This is my reaction to the situation.”

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Salonen said he’s planning a series of “Mimo” pieces.

“Actually I’m working on ‘Mimo I’ now, which is a bit weird. (I’m) using some of the techniques I learned in ‘Mimo II.’ ‘Mimo I’ is a pure orchestra piece, for a smallish orchestra, however. The plan is to have it performed in London (in) November. . . . But it’s only a plan.”

Conducting his own music is not something Salonen relishes.

“Conducting is something I do every week,” he said. “But when I’m conducting my own composition, it’s a much more unusual situation for me, and also it’s a dichotomy. I feel like two persons at the same time.

“I usually prefer someone else to conduct my own music. For me, the dream would be for me to have a drink beforehand and let someone else conduct.”

* Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his “Mimo II” (with oboist Carolyn Hove) on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The Orange County Philharmonic Society-sponsored program also includes Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 (with Imogen Cooper) and Stravinsky’s complete (1910) “Firebird.” $17 to $45. (714) 553-2422. *

NO CHARGE: The Pacific Symphony has decided to drop the $3 admission fee originally announced for students who wanted to attend the dress rehearsal of Elliot Goldenthal’s “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio” on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. This week the orchestra announced that students in grades six through 12 will be admitted free. Tickets are not necessary, but reservations are required. Information: (714) 755-4117, Ext. 280.

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