At his final concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic 16 years ago, every musician in the orchestra stood in line onstage to hug a red-faced Esa-Pekka Salonen. At every Salonen L.A. Phil appearance as conductor laureate this past year, energized audiences have begun the mantra of “bring him back.”
That wish is now being granted. The L.A. Phil has created a new position of creative director for Salonen beginning in the 2026/27 season. He will conduct the orchestra for four weeks next season and then for a minimum of six weeks the following seasons.
While the five-year appointment makes no administrative demands on Salonen, it will allow him to pursue special projects, create festivals, commission premieres, mentor young conductors in a new Salonen International Conducting Fellowship and collaborate with Lightroom, the imaginative British high-tech and artist-led immersive art venture.
This may not answer the burning question of who will follow Gustavo Dudamel. The search remains ongoing as Dudamel is about to begin his final season as L.A. Phil music director before taking over the New York Philharmonic next year. But this does assure the continuation of Salonen’s progressive vision for an orchestra of the 21st century that transformed the L.A. Phil into the world’s most successful and influential symphony orchestra.
“It makes a lot of sense from my point of view,” Salonen said on the phone from his home in Finland. “I don’t have to be part of the daily grind and carry the responsibilities of music director, but still, it’s more than being a guest conductor. It’s an opportunity [to] work on a different time perspective.”
After spending the past four decades as a music director of four orchestras, the 67-year-old Finnish composer and conductor insists he no longer wants all the responsibility that goes with leading an organization. He stepped down in June from five difficult seasons at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony, which had offered Salonen, who has a tech nerd side, what seemed like the perfect chance to imagine the symphony orchestra in ground-zero of tech innovation but then spectacularly failed to support him.
As for L.A., Salonen says, “It’s just fun.
“My idea of what an orchestra should be goes back to Ernest Fleischmann [the visionary head of the L.A. Phil who hired and empowered Salonen], the idea of an orchestra not existing in a bubble but more like being in the contemporary art scene. Having a very wide scope of things.”
This is something that Dudamel, who was Salonen’s pick to succeed him, has broadly embraced in an unprecedented expansion of a symphony orchestra into the community and beyond — adding a comprehensive arts education program (YOLA) and even taking the L.A. Phil to the Oscars, the Super Bowl and, this spring, Coachella. Salonen likens his new post to “kind of picking up the ball and keeping it all in the family.”
The new position further provides Salonen the opportunity for something else he says he has long wanted to do: move back to L.A., where he had raised a family during his 17 years as music director of the L.A. Phil and where two of his three children currently live. But Salonen has also become an international star, one of the world’s handful of leading conductors and composers. This summer he was a luminary of the prestigious Salzburg Festival and Saturday conducted the world premiere of his ravishing Horn Concerto at the Lucerne Festival that was broadcast on a Swiss radio station.
That concert was with the Orchestre de Paris, which will also now play a significant role in Salonen’s and the L.A. Phil’s future. Along with the L.A. appointment, Salonen will assume a somewhat similar post of creativity and innovation chair and principal conductor of the Philharmonie, the Paris concert hall. Several of Salonen’s L.A. Phil projects will be in conjunction with the Philharmonie and include L.A. Phil tours to Paris as well as Orchestre de Paris to Walt Disney Concert Hall.
This, in fact, is a further realization of Paris’ role in the great transformation of the L.A. Phil. In October 1996, exactly 30 years before he will begin his new L.A. Phil post, Salonen took the L.A. Phil to Paris for a monthlong Stravinsky festival. It had been nearly a decade since Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian Disney, had given the initial $55 million gift for a new concert hall. Fundraising, though, had stalled, leaving $150 million more needed to begin construction. The county was about to pull the plug.
Once L.A. Phil board members and patrons, who had traveled to Paris for the festival, heard Salonen conduct a revelatory performance of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in the Theatre du Chatelet, a concert hall where the sound came alive in ways it never could in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, there was a new last-minute urgency that saved the day.
In 2004, a year after Salonen’s triumphant opening of Disney, he inaugurated the “Tristan Project,” a co-production with and instigated by the Paris Opera. That production, directed by Peter Sellars and with video by Bill Viola, provided a whole new model for 21st century opera and for Disney Hall as a venue for artistic innovation.
The creative director post is the first major initiative by Kim Noltemy, who became L.A. Phil president and chief executive last summer, and with it she proposes a possible rethink of the very nature of how a symphony orchestra might operate in the future. The position has been endowed with a multimillion-dollar gift by Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen (the amount has not been made public but is said to be in the 10 figures) and meant to be ongoing for the foreseeable future.
Noltemy says that she hopes it will be Salonen who continues for that foreseeable future. This implies a breakdown in shift from the 19th century authoritarian artistic domination of a music director that still holds just about everywhere to a more democratic and utopian concept.
Beyond contributing to the vision of the orchestra, Salonen, as someone outside the administration, could also serve as the conscience of the organization. This, moreover, opens the path to having more than one music director, allowing the orchestra ever more breath for artistic and community expansion.
The radical implication of Fleischmann’s once controversial ideal is of a symphony orchestra expanding into a broad community of musicians, something the L.A. Phil has been gradually realizing. It already has a team of celebrated creative collaborators that includes composer John Adams, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock and Baroque music specialist Emmanuelle Haïm.
The new post may allow Salonen to play an additional role in the expansion of the Grand Avenue Cultural District. Along with the L.A. Phil, Salonen is the director of conducting at the Colburn School, across the street from Disney, and Colburn is well into the construction of a new 1000-seat concert hall behind the Grand, designed by Frank Gehry, with whom Salonen closely collaborated on the building of Disney Hall.
Gehry has for several years proposed enhancements to Disney that have fallen on deaf ears. But Noltemy says she is eager to pursue at least some of them, like projections on the outside of the hall and turning the BP Hall, where preconcert talks are given, into an elegant chamber music venue. She says there appears to be new impetus from the board and donors.
Salonen’s new appointment may not have made the role of a music director or directors irrelevant; in the meantime it leaves the L.A. Phil no longer in the lurch. With Salonen devoting six weeks to the orchestra each season, Dudamel saying he wants to return four weeks and do special projects in L.A., conductor emeritus Zubin Mehta eager for a week or two, along with Haïm’s ongoing Handel Project that already exceeds the 10 weeks a music director typically spends.
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