Word: salonen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...What I'm trying to do is prepare the orchestra for the next millennium," says Salonen, whose initial three-year contract as the orchestra's 10th music director in 73 years began this season. The city's brief classical-music history doesn't bother him at all. "I don't see myself as the savior of the Central European tradition in a backwater," he says. "On the contrary, the relative lack of tradition in L.A. is attractive. Central Europe can be very stuffy...
...Salonen's goals include introducing more contemporary music to the orchestra's staid programs -- a recent concert included two works by Gyorgy Ligeti, with the avant-garde Hungarian composer present -- and splitting the orchestra up into smaller, more flexible ensembles suited to the music of the classical period. Such notions are a marketing department's nightmare, but Salonen is adamant: "The orchestra must be a source of enlightenment." After 11 years of the saintly Carlo Maria Giulini and the ineffectual Andre Previn, the Philharmonic is ready for a youthquake. But even though Salonen is its youngest conductor since Zubin Mehta...
Indeed, he's something of a square. A self-described "uptight, serialism- oriented, would-be intellectual," Salonen was educated as a composer in his native Helsinki, in the manner of such daunting dodecaphonists as Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Nono and Elliott Carter. His conducting career began as an adjunct to his composing at the Sibelius Academy, but it took off in 1983 when he stepped in for Michael Tilson Thomas on a week's notice to lead the London Philharmonia in Mahler's woolly mammoth, the Symphony No. 3 -- despite the fact that prior to the call he had never even...
...podium, Salonen projects an aura of crisp, businesslike authority. There is none of Mehta's grandstanding glamour; instead, the conductor he most resembles is his hero Pierre Boulez, guiding his players through the most intricate rhythms with unflappable aplomb. In 1985 Salonen signed an exclusive contract with CBS, now Sony Classical, and since then has issued a steady stream of albums (the best so far: Messiaen's formidable Turangalila-Symphonie and Grieg's Peer Gynt music). Already he is one of the few living maestros who can sell the standard repertoire on the strength of his name alone...
Such is the price of a fast-paced international career. Salonen already knows the dangers firsthand: while conducting a concert of new music a few years ago with his other orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony, he temporarily blacked out, exhausted, and had to start over. He hopes to avoid being a "jet-lag conductor" by settling professionally in Los Angeles. Next season will be his last in Stockholm. "Being music director of one orchestra is enough," he says. But an added attraction in California is the enterprising Music Center Opera company; he's talking about leading a Boris Godunov there...