For decades, the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen has brought innovation to classical music and its presentation: through virtual reality, for example, or an experimental combination of scent and sound. In the case of one Apple ad campaign, he was the face of a thoroughly modern artist.
And now Salonen, 67 and a free agent after his recent departure from the San Francisco Symphony, will innovate again. Rather than take on another music director position, he has worked with institutions in Los Angeles and Paris to create new jobs that challenge the role of, and maybe even the need for, a traditional maestro.
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced that Salonen would be its first creative director, starting in fall 2026. Simultaneously, the Philharmonie de Paris announced that he would hold its inaugural creativity and innovation chair starting in 2027, while also taking on the role of principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris.
“One morning, I realized that I had been a music director or something to that effect for 40 years,” Salonen said in an interview. “And I thought, maybe that’s not the only option.”
Both appointments will be for five years to start and include duties like organizing festivals, programming and commissioning. Salonen’s broad mandate will be to think beyond conventional concert formats and bring together different disciplines, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and on the sprawling campus of the Philharmonie.
Beyond creative duties, Salonen will have conducting commitments in both cities, like a conventional music director: six weeks with the Philharmonic and eight weeks with the Orchestre de Paris, which is housed in the Philharmonie’s main concert hall. The two cities will also take part in the Salonen International Conducting Fellowship, a training program that he will oversee.
Salonen jokingly said he was enjoying this “senior citizen” phase of his life, in which “movie tickets are a little cheaper and these positions become available.” But he is also emerging from a disruptive period in his career, in which he left San Francisco when the music directorship there deteriorated over the orchestra’s financial difficulties and his disagreements with its leadership over how to move forward.
The Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris, he added, “share the same goals as I do, which has not always been the case in my professional life.” He was the music director in Los Angeles from 1992 to 2007, and opened Disney Hall. In Paris, where he has conducted for several decades, he has been involved with ambitious programming, like an immense staging of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Romeo Castellucci, and a version of Pierre Boulez’s “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna” with a dance by Benjamin Millepied.
Both orchestras have looming vacancies for a music director, who in a typical leadership model is responsible for conducting concerts, hiring players and helping to shape an ensemble’s identity. At the end of the coming season, Gustavo Dudamel will leave Los Angeles to become the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. Klaus Mäkelä will leave the Orchestre de Paris in 2027, to join the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Salonen’s new positions, with their planning and conducting responsibilities, raise questions about whether replacements for Dudamel and Mäkelä will be necessary. The Orchestre de Paris doesn’t expect to hire a new music director. But Kim Notelmy, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said the ensemble was planning to move forward with its search, while retiring the artistic portion of Dudamel’s title, which had been added for him.
“We want to ensure that the music director role oversees the general vision of the musical excellence and growth of the L.A. Phil,” Notelmy said. “We still feel like it’s an incredible opportunity.” (She added that creative director role, endowed by Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen, will become permanent.)
The Philharmonie, whose founders included Boulez, has a substantial footprint, with multiple performance spaces as well as facilities for exhibitions and education, similar to Lincoln Center in New York. In addition to the Orchestre de Paris, the campus houses the Ensemble Intercontemporain, also founded by Boulez.
Olivier Mantei, the general director of the Philharmonie, said that the spirit of Boulez remains in the center’s sensibility, and that having Salonen, who knew Boulez well, carry it on will be “a new marvel for us.”
Salonen called the Philharmonie a “fantastic campus” and said that while such an expansive canvas might be a challenge, “it’s also great because if I can find a way to use all of the campus, I will.” Already, he is working on a 2027 festival that Los Angeles and Paris will share.
“I think every orchestra on the planet should really take a good look at the model as we know it,” he said. “Is this something that can be modified or even abandoned, or something maybe not in sync with the rest of the world? I don’t know. But this kind of deal I’m entering is good because both places have the space to explore what the answer would be.”
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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