Esa-Pekka Salonen:  A Conductor's Night of Firsts

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the dynamic 42-year-old conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is also an active composer.  Indeed, until his late 20's he considered himself a composer who conducted on occasion.

New Yorkers had lacked many opportunities to experience Mr. Salonen as a composer until Sunday night, when he was the featured composer in Carnegie Hall's Making Music series.  Before a full house at Weill Recital Hall, Mr. Salonen spoke about his compositions with Ara Guzelimian, the series moderator, and conducted some of his recent works, all in their New York or United States premieres, with the impressive contemporary music group Ensemble Sospeso.

He began the evening by conducting the world premiere of Steven Stucky's bracing Ai due amici.  Mr. Stucky wrote the piece in 1998 as a short, impishly grim fortieth birthday offering to two friends:  the composer Magnus Lindberg and Mr. Salonen…

Everything about Mr. Salonen's Five Images After Sappho (1999), for soprano and chamber ensemble, showed his deep understanding of instrumentation.  The players seemed to relish the colors and textures of the work, a setting of texts by the Greek poet Sappho, selected by Mr. Salonen to trace a woman's life from the awakenings of love, to despair on the brink of matrimony, to wedded bliss, though with a hint of complications to come.  The soprano Laura Claycomb brought vibrant sound to Mr. Salonen's by turns arching and agitated vocal lines.  His musical language uses contrasting but essentially tonal elements stacked up to make the harmony spiky.  In the instrumental writing he strives to create a sensual Impressionistic shimmer with long stretches of undulant figurations and oscillating intervals…

Dichotomie began in Mr. Salonen's mind as an encore type of piece for piano but wound up a sizable work in two movements…  brilliance in the playing of Gloria Cheng.

That Mr. Salonen can write distinctive music was clear, though, from Mania, a kind of concerto for cello and chamber ensemble, complete with marimba, gongs, piano and aggressive brass and winds.  The swift pace and wild mood swings allow no wallowing in any one idea.  Meters get fractured; instrumental lines dart and collide; the harmonic language is piercing and full of surprises; and the virtuosic writing for cello, formidably played by Anssi Karttunen, lurches between anguished lyricism and fits of anger.

If Mr. Salonen's music took time to make an impression, it may have been because his compositions followed a stunning performance of Chain I, a nine-minute knockout work by Witold Lutoslawski, who was an important mentor to Mr. Salonen.  Surely one reason he conducts works like this so well is that he composes himself.  May he long continue doing both.   

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