Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes
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With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.
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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
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The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.
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Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.
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We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.
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I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.
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I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.
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The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.
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There is such a suspicion in today's world of people who do more than one thing, who aren't specialized.
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I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.
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I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.
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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
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Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.
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I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
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There is more openness in LA to possibilities than on the East Coast of America. There is a pioneering spirit there that stems from the reason people went out there in the first place-to find something new.
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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
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I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.
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Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
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The Northern idea of form is more of a process. The various units of the form overlap. You can't tell where some things stop and new things start. This is typical of Sibelius.
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I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.
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I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.
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There was this kind of mildly annoying mythology about conductor Like biker should riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, and wearing a sort of a leather suit.
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Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.