Advertisement

Patt Morrison Asks: Noteworthy, Esa-Pekka Salonen

Share

They’re honoring the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prizes this week, but there are a number of human endeavors the Nobels don’t cover. Music composition is one of them, and in the breach there is the University of Louisville’s prestigious Grawemeyer Award, whose founder once mused that such a prize might mean “perhaps we could find another Mozart.” Its latest winner is Esa-Pekka Salonen, who for 17 years held the baton at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But the Grawemeyer honors what he did with a pen -- or a computer mouse, or both: the “Violin Concerto” he composed in his last months in L.A. He’s taking his concerto on tour, from Boston to Hamburg. Salonen now heads the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, but he zipped back to L.A. for another turn at the podium, conducting the premiere of a nearly 80-year-old opera fragment -- and taking a bow for the Grawemeyer.

That’s some honor. What does it mean for you and the Philharmonic?

The list of previous recipients is like my house gods -- Witold Lutoslawski, John Adams, Pierre Boulez -- and then of the younger ones, many are very close friends and people I admire most in the world of composition. It’s an important prize in its way, and it’s not coincidental that they decided to give out awards in categories the Nobel Prize doesn’t cover.

Advertisement

This may be the first time in classical music that a heavy drum kit figures into the composition. How does something like this advance classical music?

I wouldn’t dare to claim that one piece of music would radically push the envelope, but if you look at the history of the symphony orchestra, every generation has brought in new instruments, and the range of a symphony orchestra has been expanded by composers who want to explore new possibilities in terms of adding stuff. I’m not the first one to use a rock kit in a classical context, but I am fairly certain this is the first one in a concerto, so while it might not be unprecedented, it’s very rare. And it fits in quite nicely, I have to say.

The concerto took nine months to compose.

That was not planned, by the way.

Like many other nine-month human undertakings.

In my case, it started with little sketches and thoughts on scraps of paper; once I had enough material, then I started getting [them to] Leila [Josefowicz, the soloist] for her to play and give me feedback in terms of the technicalities of violin playing.

Is it unusual to collaborate like that?

Advertisement

Not really. Most people today who write solo concertos for instruments they don’t play themselves collaborate to some degree with the performer [so] that you don’t write anything that goes against the nature of the instrument or is unplayable. What made it somewhat unusual is that we weren’t physically in the same place because of her schedule and mine. So most of this was done on Skype. If I sent something on email, she would print it and then play a bit of it back to me over Skype. It’s as if we were in the same room but we might have been on different continents -- and mostly, we were.

Where are you in the concerto? And where is Los Angeles in it?

I was so aware that the performance of the “Violin Concerto” was going to be [in] my penultimate week with the orchestra, and I was preparing for stepping down after 17 good years. I think it’s the third movement with the rock kit and the dance energy where L.A. figures most. And I wrote in the program notes something like, “Hooray for freedom of expression, and thank you, guys.”

By this I meant my own kind of liberalization process when I moved here. After a few years in L.A. I felt free from various dogmas and rules and taboos of the European modernism and the sort of hyper-intellectual rigor that was very much the [rule] in Europe. L.A. somehow liberated me from all that. That was unbelievably important in my own development, because finally I had the possibility of becoming the kind of composer I wanted to become.

And I’m not the only one who has had this experience in California. This is a good place to find oneself because of the open-mindedness of this place.

[In California] I learned a way to deal with people without being aggressive, and I learned that I get the best results out of an orchestra and an institution when they are motivated and we share the same goals rather than me trying to force my point of view.

Advertisement

When you lived in L.A., you had a chance to buy Igor Stravinsky?s house ? but didn?t.

What is it like to come back and conduct on your old home turf?

The first time I came back, after a hiatus of 18 months or so, I was kind of worried because I didn’t know what to expect, whether it would feel strange or whether it would be overwhelmingly emotional. But when I walked in, the guy at the security desk said, “Hi, how have you been?”

And for me that was the greatest relief. I started working again from where I left it. There was no sense of weirdness or alienation; it was just normal.

When I came back this time, it was the same thing: OK, I’m back, let’s make the music. The orchestra is really thriving with Gustavo [Dudamel], and I can sense the very good energy he’s giving them.

When you lived in L.A., you had a chance to buy Igor Stravinsky?s house -- but didn?t.

I just came back to my senses! I don?t think there are many other composers I admire as much as Stravinsky, and he has been a huge influence on my life. But if I had bought his house and tried to compose music in that very room, it would have been just doomed! Life is complicated enough and the challenges are formidable anyway, and to sit there [with the presence of] a giant, I don?t think it would have been very healthy. Also my wife suggested this might not be the perfect home to raise small children.

Advertisement

What should have happened was, someone should have bought it and made it a public or semipublic museum space. We?re talking about one of the most important creative artists of all time.

In the 1960s, Los Angeles audiences were mocked for applauding between movements. How are they now?

The L.A. audience is the most curious, open-minded audience I ever got. Playing music that is absolutely not standard -- it?s nice to hear Beethoven and Brahms, but [they] also want to hear new things, to know what?s going on in the minds of creative people today, and that is very rare.

You were just here conducting the premiere of a recently discovered piece by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, part of a 1932 opera called ?Orango.? Some people thought it was lost; some people thought it never existed.

It was an astonishing story. There was a persistent rumor about “Orango,” but there was no physical evidence that Shostakovich had ever worked on it. The cleaning lady was being bribed to save everything in his wastebasket that had notes on it. [It] ended up in a cardboard box in the basement of the Glinka Museum in Moscow. It was found in 2004, and after a few years, the widow, Irina, asked [composer] Gerard McBurney to orchestrate it. He told me about it, and I said, “I want to conduct it.”

Irina Shostakovich was here for the premiere.

Advertisement

I introduced her to the audience before we played it and thanked her for her work. I thought that there was a sort of gasp of disbelief in the audience because history came so very close.

What did you think when you first saw the manuscript?

It’s very different from the kind of Shostakovich we usually hear. It’s a raucous, wild, wacko kind of piece that’s highly entertaining and funny. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I opened the score for the first time. There were lots of familiar things popping up, and there, quotations of [composer Modest] Mussorgsky, bits and pieces from Tchaikovsky, Offenbach.

Then I read that [Shostakovich] had been to Berlin just before he started writing this. The Weimar Republic must have been quite an adventure for a guy in his mid-20s; he heard jazz, he heard Kurt Weill, he heard operetta. And he was just bursting with all that new stuff when he came back to Russia. [Orango] is like an advertisement for the pleasures of the ‘20s.

What is it like conducting the London Philharmonia? How different is it from L.A.?

It’s a totally different animal. There are five symphony orchestras performing every week [in London], plus the visiting orchestras. The musical life in London, the sheer volume of it, is unmatched by any other place on Earth. So the challenge is to somehow cut through the white noise [of] the music output every night. Because of the fact that so many orchestras are playing the same repertoire night after night, I decided to create projects that have a very clear sort of identity. I did a huge Bartok project; I’ve done a project that concentrated on Vienna in 1900. Things that have a clear identity seem to be working well with audiences in London.

Advertisement

Have you been able to shift from being a conductor who composes to a composer who conducts?

I’ve been conducting a bit too much to be able to write all the projects I’ve been hoping to be able to do, but I’m going to cut down my conducting even further.

patt.morrison@latimes.com

This interview was edited and excerpted from a longer taped transcript. Interview archive: latimes.com/pattasks.

Advertisement