He’s Finding His Voice

A certain amount of conducting ability is very handy for a composer. Stravinsky, Copland, Britten, Adams all have proved effective advocates as composer-conductors (despite the inevitable grumbles about technique) for not just their music but their musical points of view.

Too much conducting talent and technique, on the other hand, can be a composer’s curse. Bernstein, Boulez--and perhaps Oliver Knussen will be another--are examples of conflicted composers for whom success on the podium overwhelmed output. The same has been so far true of Esa-Pekka Salonen, one of the most gifted conductors of our time but, as yet, a minor composer.

Might it be otherwise for the still young (41) music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic? It might.

Thursday night at Royce Hall, UCLA, in a special Green Umbrella concert devoted to four of his most recent works, Salonen was, at last, the composer-conductor he has always longed to be. The occasion was his farewell to his orchestra as he begins a year’s sabbatical from conducting to compose. It was a bittersweet event. The music was joyous, and the sense of occasion, exhilarating; but that only reinforced the fear that it could get a bit dull around here without him (although don’t be surprised if Salonen squeezes in a couple of appearances this summer at the Hollywood Bowl and the beginning of next season).

Though still in the process of finding his composer’s voice, Salonen indicated throughout this survey of his orchestral works that a strong, whimsical, sensual, exciting and individual voice is, indeed, emerging. The breakthrough piece was “LA Variations,” written for the Philharmonic in 1996. That it was a breakthrough for Salonen was obvious at the moment of its premiere. The revelation of Thursday’s terrific performance is that it could be more.

As a composer and conductor, Salonen is a brilliant problem solver. And it is that brilliance that first got him very far very fast. It provided his well-engineered early music with a dazzling clockwork complexity that could be very exciting to hear for sheer virtuosity it demanded. It also provided his equally well-engineered early performances of big orchestral works, in which rhythms and details so expertly revealed, with a certain excitement. But there was always the lingering suspicion that he was more engineer than poet, a cool and calculating--if electric--musician.

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In recent years, as his technique as both conductor and composer has become more sure, his sense of his music and self has deepened, he has begun choosing more interesting problems to solve. He has gone beyond technique and begun to look at problems of communication. As a conductor, he has learned not just what makes a Brahms symphony fascinating but what makes it come to immediate life for an audience. As a composer, he has begun to learn exactly the same lesson.

With each new hearing of “LA Variations” (and the good news is that it and the other pieces on the Green Umbrella program are being recorded by Sony Classical), the work seems an important solution not just to Salonen’s own compositional dilemma--the balancing of head and heart--but to the broader issues of musical language that face turn-of-the-century composers. Namely, how does a composer proceed after such a clamorous century, a century in which sophisticated music has become both a science and an art?

In “LA Variations,” that solution is wonderfully apparent from the first bars. A couple of big, thick complex chords are heard in the guise of scales heading up the orchestra at different speeds. Then the chord becomes the theme, its notes turned into a frilly, computer-age fake but catchy Finnish folk tune. The rest of the piece, a grand concerto for orchestra, is the adventure of those chords and that tune. Sometimes the thrill is the ride--the big orchestra is a glorious big machine for Salonen--and sometimes the thrill is the scenery as the tune dances and thunders. And sometimes the thrill is intellectual, the sheer cleverness of it all, as Stravinsky, Sibelius, Debussy, Schoenberg, Ligeti, Boulez, who linger in the background of this piece, occasionally step up, theatrically, into the foreground.

Indeed, “LA Variations” is, in the end, theatrical and infectious. Yet it is based upon advanced ideas of harmony and color--and that, more and more, seems like a genuinely new development in music. The 20-minute performance, a minute or two slower than the premiere, was arresting in its grandeur, confidence and extraordinary power, which also, of course, sold the music. So did the fact that it came at the end of an all-Salonen program. A concert devoted to a single young composer is a rare event anywhere and an audience challenge. Here, a large receptive crowd that would honor any arts capital went bananas.

The other works on the program were “Gambit,” the short and brilliant piece written in the summer of 1997 as a 40th birthday present to Salonen’s colleague, Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg; the equally short “Giro,” a reworking of an earlier piece; and “Five Images After Sappho,” songs for soprano and chamber orchestra that were premiered at the Ojai Festival in June. These are all bright pieces, but none so ambitious as “LA Variations.”

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“Gambit”--with its quirky rhythms, swelling chords and cascading scales--is a riotous curtain-raiser, particularly as the rumble of conga drums becomes a whole orchestra’s worth of pounding thirds. “Giro” is more curious, a harmonically robust recasting of an earlier, more rigidly academic style. The “Sappho” songs, luminously sung here (as at the premiere) by Laura Claycomb (Dawn Upshaw will make the recording), reveal a new interest sensual, lyrical vocal writing.

In Salonen’s case, exactly what should come before the hyphen, composer or conductor, is now hard to say. He seems to have become an interesting and potentially important composer precisely because he brings to his music the experience of performing. But Thursday’s concert was a watershed, proving that the composer part of the equation is significant. This will be the year for Salonen, the problem solver, to balance that difficult equation.