Conductor in a Candy Store

Dressed in black jeans, black sweatshirt and boating shoes, Esa-Pekka Salonen walks comfortably into the room. He has the confident air of someone who works here, who belongs here, who maybe lives here.

The here is a beautiful, Old World upstairs foyer at the Theatre du Chatelet. On the walls are posters from the Ballets Russes. It was in this theater that Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” had its premiere. It is in this theater that Salonen has been in residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the month, participating in a Stravinsky festival, before starting his fifth season as music director this week back home at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Salonen has come from a rehearsal to be photographed and to talk about Los Angeles and his role with the Philharmonic. He hasn’t shaved.

Salonen, or course, does belong here in Paris, and he has been proving it every day of the residency. The schedule has been punishing: performing several nights of Peter Sellars’ new production of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” with concerts by the orchestra and the New Music Group in between. The reviews have been, for orchestra and conductor, quotable, even a little preposterous. Yes, the Philharmonic has been playing sensationally well. No, Los Angeles’ orchestra is not quite the equal of Holland’s Concertgebouw, or of the Vienna or Berlin philharmonics, as a critic from Rome claimed.

Born in Finland in 1958 and a composer as well as a conductor, Salonen says that he fancies himself a fairly typical European intellectual. And Paris is a city in which he has spent time on what he calls “the Boulez trolley,” working at the high-tech composition laboratory IRCAM, which Pierre Boulez founded.

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But Salonen also now belongs in Los Angeles. Since becoming music director of the Philharmonic in 1992, he is based in California nine months of the year. He lives in Santa Monica with his wife, Jane Price, and their two young daughters, Ella Aneira and Anja Sofia. He has become one of Southern California’s best-known faces, thanks to the Philharmonic’s unrelenting advertising campaign, which keeps Salonen on billboards and street-lamp banners around town. And he looks the part of a Los Angeles conductor--young, blond and fit.

After four years, Los Angeles has changed Salonen, and he it. His influence on the orchestra can be found in its strong morale, its technical confidence and its sense of adventure. Audiences are younger and livelier than they have been since the early days of Zubin Mehta in the ‘60s. As for Los Angeles’ effect on Salonen, it seems to be loosening him up.

“For a Finn, Los Angeles is just like a candy store,” Salonen explains, casually straddling the back of his chair. “You know, I grew up in the most completely homogenous culture in Europe. Ninety-eight percent of the population of Finland is Lutheran. The population is almost completely Finnish. There is a tiny minority of Gypsies, a tiny Jewish population and even a more minute Islamic crowd. If you grow up in a place like that and then you come to Los Angeles, it can be really stimulating.

“And yet I don’t feel isolated from my European origins at all, because there is a lot of old European stuff left in Los Angeles. Every day when I go to the Music Center, I drive by one of the residences of Bertolt Brecht on 26th Street.

“It obviously takes awhile to find a variety of things in Los Angeles. What you see first is really repulsive. That sort of endless barracks and the ugliness of shallow ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s architecture and culture. But you get used to it, and you don’t see it after awhile.

“And once you learn what’s underneath, the multilayered culture, the very interesting mixture of pioneer spirit and old European stuff and Mexican influence and all that, then it gets really fascinating.”

And then there is the climate. Finland is a cold country, and the warm weather of Los Angeles seems to have warmed some of his Northern coolness.

“It’s very interesting to see how that sort of constant heat of Los Angeles kind of makes things melt,” Salonen observes.

The evidence of his own temperature change, Salonen says, is in his music. Although hardly a prolific composer these days, given that he has two children, one orchestra and a festival (the Helsinki) to look after, as well as a busy schedule of recording and guest conducting, he does still keep at it, and he is busy at work on a new orchestral piece that he will premiere with the Philharmonic in January.

“I think that the most telling example of [Los Angeles’ influence] would actually be that I first had a sort of working title of ‘Anatomia,’ because it was based on some physical models. But when I got to know more about what kind of piece it would be, I changed the title. Now it’s working title is ‘LA Variations.’ ”

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Still, no matter how much Los Angeles may be getting under Salonen’s skin, no one really expected him to conduct a program like the one he will be leading Monday night, at the pre-subscription season pension fund benefit concert. Although it contains one of Salonen’s most successful repertory pieces, “The Rite of Spring” (with which he has just wowed Paris), Stravinsky’s revolutionary ballet is being billed as music from “Fantasia,” and the rest of the program includes soundtracks written for Alfred Hitchcock films by Bernard Herrmann and even a bit of John Williams’ “E.T.” music. Moreover, the Philharmonic’s latest Sony disc is of Herrmann’s film music conducted by Salonen.

“I’m a film buff actually,” Salonen says. “I’ve been very interested in films since I was a child. And when I started thinking about what is unique about Los Angeles, what is it that we have locally that other orchestras don’t, I thought: ‘Film music.’ A symphony orchestra has to be completely connected to its own milieu; otherwise it doesn’t go anywhere. The strength of the Vienna Philharmonic is the fact they play their stuff. And what is our stuff? Obviously Schoenberg and Stravinsky, because they are homeboys. And the sort of pioneering spirit and image of Los Angeles.

“But the modern image is of film. And I certainly don’t see any ideological problem about playing a piece by Herrmann or [Jerry] Goldsmith or [Elmer] Bernstein on a symphonic program.

“I started with Herrmann because he is one of the best ones. And one thing that is interesting about this music is that it’s almost like folklore. There are some of these tunes, like the love scene from ‘Vertigo’ that everybody can whistle, that everybody can recognize without knowing what it is. So I thought it would be interesting to dig into this. And some of these scores are tremendously interesting by any standards. So it makes a lot of sense.

“Moreover, when I came to Los Angeles, I found this complete separation between the high arts and the industry hard to understand. I thought that the industry would be the most natural source of funding and patronage and audiences, because we are in the same field--entertainment in the widest meaning of the word. But when I finally got to Los Angeles, I discovered that there was a complete separation, that these two worlds never interacted at all.

“Later, I learned that there were historical reasons for this, that the arts were funded by the WASP money from Pasadena, and the nouveau riche culture on the Westside was never highly appreciated by the old supporters of art. But obviously that is completely out of date.

“And now I think we are heading toward a more eclectic culture anyway. For instance, most people of my generation who consume classical music also consume ethnic music and more esoteric rock. So for the reason of sheer survival, we should find links with other art forms to make it more artistically interesting. And the links between the symphony orchestra and film haven’t been exploited at all to the degree that they could be exploited. I can fully imagine that works of art could be created where the symphony orchestra would have a more important role than just distant background music.”

In fact, Salonen has scheduled a press conference after Monday’s concert to announce some specific new Philharmonic film industry projects that will get underway this season.

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Salonen may have been a film buff in his pre-Hollywood Scandinavian days, but he was not, until Los Angeles, an opera buff.

“Fifteen years ago, I thought that opera was dead and that there was no place to go,” he says. “But I have changed my mind completely.”

Now, in fact, Salonen has become a major figure in international opera, along with another Angeleno, Peter Sellars. They first worked together when the Philharmonic went to the Salzburg Festival in 1992 to mount Olivier Messiaen’s epic opera “St. Francois d’Assise,” a triumph that also traveled to Paris and the Cha^telet, a production that L.A. Opera opted out of but that will return next summer to Salzburg, along with the Philharmonic, and that the Lincoln Center Festival is angling for.

Last winter, Sellars and Salonen made a new production of Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” at Covent Garden in London that was generally thought to be the high point internationally of the season’s celebrations of Hindemith’s 100th birthday. This summer, they will work together again, on Gyorgy Ligeti’s opera “Le Grand Macabre” in Salzburg, with the production moving to Paris next year.

Typical of their collaboration is the new “Rake” in Paris. Much of the opera world came, and while some were offended by Sellars’ updated, angst-ridden production--set in a scary Los Angeles prison--Salonen received universal praise. But the conductor also puts it in perspective, pointing out Sellars’ crucial contribution to the musical as well as the theatrical performance, since the director is renowned for his ability to get committed performances.

And it is this revolutionary approach to opera that Salonen says has made him eager to pursue opera further:

“When you have a team like this where there are no opera stars and everybody is really fanatically interested in expression and a director who understands both music and theater, it’s incredibly exciting. In fact, a couple of weeks ago when we had a particularly good rehearsal with these singers here, I went back home and I said to Jane, ‘You know, I want to write an opera.’ ”

That Salonen and Sellars are in demand all over the world as one the hottest teams in opera strikes Salonen as ironic, given their inability to get their productions put on at home. Los Angeles has only seen the Sellars-directed, Salonen-conducted production of “Pelleas et Melisande,” the one updated to an O.J.-like situation in Malibu, last year at L.A. Opera, but that was originally a collaboration with Simon Rattle for Netherlands Opera. Rattle pulled out of the Music Center performances when his wife, soprano Elise Ross, was dropped from the production.

“This is something of a problem for us that we don’t do opera in Los Angeles,” Salonen complains. “Almost everything in opera that I have done and will do for the next three years is with Peter. We had planned to do the ‘Rake’ in ’99 in Los Angeles, but the company pulled out about a month ago. It seems that the aesthetics of Peter and me and the aesthetics of the current L.A. Opera ideology don’t match.

“It just feels so wrong toward the Los Angeles audiences. There are these two guys who live in Los Angeles, and they go and do opera everywhere and never in Los Angeles. And, whatever you think of these things we do, they create quite a lot of buzz. At least the statement is there. We even thought of producing the ‘Rake’ ourselves with the Philharmonic, but the stage is a bit too complex to be done with our resources.”

While presenting opera in L.A. may be out of Salonen’s hands, the direction of the Los Angeles Philharmonic is not likely to be at all. These are transitional times for the orchestra. Its longtime domineering managing director, Ernest Fleischmann--not incidentally, one of the people responsible for discovering Salonen--will be retiring at the end of the season. The board has made it clear that Salonen will be taking an increasingly active role in running the orchestra and that he will have a great deal to say about who Fleischmann’s successor will be.

And Salonen makes clear that the No. 1 priority for the orchestra is the building of the financially stalled Disney Concert Hall. If money can be found to close its $150-million funding gap (with at least $50 million needed by June or the project will be canceled), the hall will become the Philharmonic’s new home.

“The hall is a very crucial thing in the future of the Philharmonic,” he asserts, “because we are now in the ridiculous situation that to really hear how the Philharmonic sounds you practically have to go to other countries. The kind of sound we are able to make in the pit here [at the Cha^telet] we can’t make at home, and it is very frustrating.

“I see it clearer and clearer that the hall is really the key issue here. It’s not maybe a question of survival in a Darwinist sense, but certainly there is a lot of very good momentum at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It is a very ambitious band and very hard-working, and we have some fantastic new talent in the orchestra, and the spirit is very good. And it could be that, if it became clear that the hall is actually going to happen, this would really bring things forward.

“But if there was a message that the hall is buried and gone, I think it would be rather difficult to keep the momentum going. The musicians are human beings like everybody else, and it’s nice to have some recognition at home and see some signs of fulfilling a function that has some importance in people’s minds.

“If the hall were not to happen, it would mean that we are not important enough, and that would be very hard to cope with psychologically. We would survive, no doubt. But I don’t even want to think about it. Somehow I’ve ruled out the option of the hall not happening, because I don’t know what I would do.”

The Paris residency could prove to be the turning point for Disney Hall, to hear the talk from Philharmonic patrons and board members who traveled with the orchestra and were astounded to hear what it sounded like in the Cha^telet’s immediate acoustic. And to drive home Los Angeles’ plight, Paris provided the sad sight of the American Center. The building, by Disney Hall architect Frank O. Gehry, stands empty, forlorn, for sale, since the center went bankrupt last year. It stands as a symbol of America’s lack of cultural pride.

The symbol was not lost on the new hall’s supporters in Paris, many of whom seemed newly committed to aggressive fund-raising in hopes that Los Angeles might counter the image of a culturally bankrupt America that so many Europeans believe to be the case.

“Now I think for the first time there are very clear signs of moving forward,” Salonen says optimistically. “I think that the crisis is over. There is more awareness now in the community of the full impact of the hall. It is something much beyond a concert hall. The gesture has to do with the self-image of Los Angeles, and it has to do with the public image of Los Angeles. It would be a nice symbol of constructive policies.

“At least I’m naive enough to be willing to think that way.”

He is not, however, so naive that he does not realize that this all-important season, when the fate of Disney Hall and the future of the orchestra will decided, is very much in his hands.

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Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the L.A. Philharmonic in the pension fund benefit concert, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Monday, 7 p.m.; $15 to $60. Also in the orchestra’s season openers, Thursday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; $10 to $75. (213) 365-3500.