Esa-Pekka Salonen’s two-week stint conducting the L.A. Phil in exceptional Beethoven and Boulez performances spurs more hopeful talk that he might return as music director after Gustavo Dudamel departs.
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Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic celebrated the centenary of Pierre Boulez’s birth with an extravagance of sonic invention and dance. Eight clusters of Los Angeles Philharmonic players, ranging from a single oboe to groupings of winds and brass and strings seated onstage and around Walt Disney Concert Hall, set a ceremonial tone. Percussion was exotic. Six members of L.A. Dance Project performed as if ejected by each of the 14 sections of Boulez’s resonant score.
Over its 23-year history, Disney Hall has seemingly seen it all thanks to the L.A. Phil’s eagerness to indulge exorbitant (and costly) fancies. It has done it again in an extraordinary tribute concert unlike any other.
The question is: Now what?
The extraordinary performance of Boulez’s “Rituel” on Sunday concluded Salonen’s seasonal two-week appearances as L.A. Phil conductor laureate. It also was his first time back with his old orchestra after announcing last year that he would not renew his contract as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, acknowledging that he did not share its board’s vision for the future.
Speculation has grown over a Salonen return to the L.A. Phil. No one has yet been named to succeed Gustavo Dudamel, who leaves at the end of next season to take over the New York Philharmonic.
When Kim Noltemy became president and CEO last summer, the hiring relieved worry that the L.A. Phil board might take it upon itself to appoint a music director. It is now likely that the L.A. Phil may be without a music director for a couple of years. And from the enthusiastic response of audiences and reportedly of the musicians, nothing would make many happier than having Salonen back to guide the orchestra through a transition period.
We’ll have to wait and see whether Salonen, who turns 67 next month, would accept such an offer. He has made it clear that — after a long career as music director in Stockholm, London, L.A. and San Francisco — he welcomes a reprieve from institutional demands. He is sought after as composer and conductor and can now do exactly what he wants.
Even so, his 17 history-making years as music director of the L.A. Phil and his thus far 16 years as conductor laureate have allowed him to have realized his ambitions on a scale nowhere else imaginable. In L.A. he has a venue like no other in Disney Hall, which he opened. The L.A. Phil is an orchestra more flexible than any other, and in L.A. Salonen has benefited from daring administrations able to afford Salonen’s effort to create an orchestra for a new era — a promise the San Francisco Symphony couldn’t, or wouldn’t, deliver.
All of this was evident in Salonen’s Boulez tribute with the L.A. Phil. Benjamin Millepied’s choreography for “Rituel,” featuring his L.A. Dance Project, had its premiere with Salonen conducting Orchestre de Paris at the Philharmonie in Paris on Boulez’s 100th birthday in March. That program began with a small octet by Stravinsky and Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
Even though that concert was in the Philharmonie’s Grande salle Pierre Boulez and was arguably the city’s most important tribute to a composer who had been a musical monarch in Paris, only that one half-hour Boulez piece was on the program. At Disney, the L.A. Phil’s huge program began with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing two of Boulez’s solo “Notations” followed by the composer’s massively expanded versions requiring a huge orchestra with large brass and wind sections, three harps and considerable percussion.
Fifteen extra players were required for less than 10 minutes of music. When I asked Noltemy about that expense, she asked with a laugh, when has the L.A. Phil ever let budget get in the way of artistic ambition?
Along with “Notations,” Salonen conducted Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Aimard, and Debussy’s “La Mer,” works that he recorded with the L.A. Phil in the 1990s. Those recordings hold up for their crystalline sound and youthful spunk. Those qualities remain, but with a new richness and sense of overpowering fullness.
Indeed, conductor, orchestra, repertoire and hall all were simply made for one another.
Boulez’s music is complexly detailed and has had a long history of putting off audiences. But in the right context, it can be heard as though a brilliant flowering of Debussy’s colors and flavors. Aimard played the tiny piano fourth and seventh “Notations” with rapt attention on tiny details, while Salonen saw to it that the orchestral explosions contained multitudes of colors within controlled chaos. Aimard added a couple more “Notations” as an encore to his soulful, robust way with Bartok’s concerto, especially in the beautiful middle movement.
“Rituel” was a memorial to the Italian composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, who died in 1973. They seemed very different personalities, the analytical Boulez and the sensual Maderna, but “Rituel” profoundly reveals that they had much in common. Boulez’s score, full of Asian and Indonesian percussion, is, in its own way, as sonically engulfing as anything by Maderna. It also makes an for an easy connection with the revolutionary influence of Japanese music on Debussy’s “La Mer,” which then went on to influence Boulez, who made conducting it a specialty.
Each of the different groups in “Rituel” has its own highly organized music. They come together, cued by the conductor, with a sense of nature’s unpredictability. So was the case, as well, with Millepied’s superb dancers, who went their own ways but collided and coagulated, ferociously and sexually. There has been little dance made to Boulez. Millepied shows that however formidable the rhythms, there could be more.
For Salonen’s previous week with the L.A. Phil, he began with Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” floating through the hall. Bryce Dessner’s recent Violin Concerto was dominated by soloist Pekka Kuusisto’s vivid bowing, creating astonishing acoustical effects with harmonics. Salonen ended with Beethoven’s “Eroica,” which he made sound like it could have been written after Dessner’s concerto, not more than two centuries before.
What’s next for Salonen? His final San Francisco Symphony concerts are next month, assuming the orchestra doesn’t go on strike.
He has a busy summer that begins by touring the New York Philharmonic to Korea and China. There are appearances with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, a collaboration with director Peter Sellars in Salzburg, the world premieres of his Horn Concerto in Lucerne, a European tour with the Orchestre de Paris.
Early fall, Salonen reprises “Rituel” with the New York Philharmonic, which is a co-commisioner of the choreography along with L.A. and Paris. On it goes pretty much nonstop throughout the rest of the year. He’s back in L.A. in January with more ambitious programming.
None of this makes a Salonen return to L.A. sound necessary. But there remain opportunities here that can only be dreams elsewhere.
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