Esa-Pekka Salonen Says Tweak the Orchestra, Don't Blow it Up

“It’s actually dangerous to equate the health of some institutions with the health of the art form,” Salonen, 60, added. Music is doing fine, he said — “it’s just that some institutions are having trouble. Those are completely different things.”

Salonen — who seemed for a time happy to float in that just-fine realm of pure music, writing his own works and conducting selectively — is now diving back into those troubled institutions. The San Francisco Symphony recently made the surprise announcement that in 2020, when Michael Tilson Thomas steps aside after 25 years as its music director, Salonen will be his replacement.

Since the late 1960s, when fiery young Pierre Boulez said that the only solution to the entrenched conservatism of classical music was to blow up the opera houses and destroy all the art of the past, there have been calls for systemic change.

Yet Boulez mellowed over time, and became a revered figure at leading opera houses and orchestras, working within the system to improve it rather than exploding it. And Salonen, who came to attention as a flinty Finnish modernist composer, has taken a similar course. Yes, he wants to shake things up, but from the inside. In taking on another orchestra directorship, a decade after leaving a landmark tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he hopes to find the sweet spot between gutting the system and maintaining what works.

“The infrastructure of what we call classical music is going to evolve into something else,” Salonen said, though “we don’t quite know what it is.” But there is no reason to panic, he emphasized. “Obviously, it’s in no one’s interest to blow up the existing structure and start all over. It would be counterproductive.”

Salonen will arrive in San Francisco with something of a head start: Thomas has fostered a climate of experimentation. And Salonen certainly proved himself a model of fresh thinking during his 17-year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has more recently refreshed the Philharmonia Orchestra as its principal conductor — including, in recent years, explorations of digital technology and virtual reality projects.

He comes at his new position, moreover, as a working composer. He suggested that, by “doing something as strange as writing new art music, you send out a very optimistic signal that I actually believe in this. And I believe in the longevity of the art form, and also believe there is a lot to be said still. When we talk about the masters, the underlying message is that the best has happened already. I don’t think so.”

A symphony orchestra, Salonen said, is too often described as a mechanism with pieces people have put together. To him, an orchestra is an “organism” that “kind of grows.” Better ways to present it and integrate it into the community must be found.

But, he made clear, “I don’t want to mess with the physiology of the orchestra.”

So what is he willing to mess with? The weekly subscription-series programming format — “the grid,” as Salonen called it — increasingly seems an impediment to artistic vitality. “We are presented with a grid,” he explained, “and then you kind of fill it with content, and the content can be interesting, good and imaginative, but it still has to fit into the grid.”

Most people today, especially younger listeners, don’t like to commit themselves months in advance, let alone to a series of concerts. Salonen envisions breaking up the season into blocks, maybe three or four, each with a thematic hook. With the culture increasingly diverse and fragmented, Salonen said, the “mainstream idea has all but disappeared.”

Symphony orchestras and opera companies must accept that there is no musical mainstream, either, so institutions should try to reach “as many people as possible by catering to different tastes,” he said. That means not just unusual ventures of the kind he oversaw in Los Angeles — the Minimalist Jukebox series; festivals of film music; “The Tristan Project,” a performance of Wagner’s opera that employed as backdrops videos by Bill Viola — but also now and then a concert or mini festival devoted to Brahms or Sibelius, for those who want an immersion in a single composer.

Who will help him conceive these programming blocks? Though he doesn’t know yet what to call them, Salonen has recruited a roster of mostly younger, visionary artists to advise him and create their own programs — a kind of “brain trust,” he said. This diverse creative team includes: pianist and film composer Nicholas Britell; soprano Julia Bullock; flutist, educator and champion of new music Claire Chase; violinist Pekka Kuusisto; composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner; composer Nico Muhly; jazz bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding; and artificial intelligence entrepreneur Carol Reiley.

The “grid” will have to be loosened to allow these artists creative leeway, Salonen said. He says he’ll make it happen.

Salonen has more problems with the promotion of classical music than with its substance. The message he said is often conveyed — “come and hear an immortal masterpiece performed by Maestro So-and-So and a great symphony orchestra” — is actually off-putting. “Lots of concert halls look like shrines or temples, like a Parthenon,” he added. “You climb up to make yourself worthy” and “walk out a better person.”

“The good thing,” he said, “is that the actual material we are dealing with on a daily basis is fantastic” — some of “the best things humankind has ever produced.” He remains convinced that the ideal way to engage new listeners and give meaningful performances of those masterpieces is to present them alongside comparably ambitious modern and contemporary works.

Salonen said that classical music is bungling what could be a selling point of orchestras. A Beyoncé concert might have a band of 20 on stage and 20,000 people in the audience, he said. That ratio is very different from what people get at the symphony, with roughly 100 players and 2,000 people. As a result, an orchestral concert becomes an event of “human energy, human expression — and people react strongly to that.”

Despite his fascination with digital music resources and virtual reality, Salonen fretted that “90 percent of social media is about nothing.”

“In my opinion,” he said, “when politicians say the reason for the fragmentation of culture is immigration, it’s absolutely not true.” The reason, he insisted, “is the media, which is usually not in the hands of immigrants. I think a lot of social media is trying to create some kind of belonging, some type of cultural connection.”

A concert can provide that belonging. A program of symphonic music in a grand hall as an antidote to isolation bred by social media? Salonen — an explorer and, in the best sense, a traditionalist — makes a persuasive case.

There’s a certain moment when you go offline and someone curates a space, with a piece, and the power of the ritual,” he said. “You have this moment, along with many others, but still a finite experience. It happens in real time, but it will never happen again, and you were there. You can let yourself go. And I think that’s actually a real liberation. We are going to need that more than ever before.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.