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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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We're dealing with music that is being played by traditional instruments in a specifically built building called a concert hall. But classical is not - the reference is wrong, because classical on one hand refers to one period in musical history, which is Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven, which is a fine period in musical history, but it was a while ago.On the other hand, it sort of alludes to some kind of "class," which A, is not true; B, is kind of detrimental to the whole idea. Because the point is that this music is available and it's actually relatively reasonably priced.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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You know, in some ways conducting is counter-intuitive. It's like winter driving in Finland - if you skid, the natural reaction is to fight with the wheel and jam on the brakes, which is the quickest way to get killed. What you have to do is let go, and the car will right itself. It's the same when an orchestra loses its ensemble. You have to resist the temptation to semaphore, and let the orchestra find its own way back to the pulse.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
I started conducting lessons and I realized that this is actually something I like doing.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
The classical music industry, has been an industry of covers. So we do covers, and if I compare this with the rock and pop side, what is the most exciting event?
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it's actually exhausting.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the World War II, and the whole industry became more backward-looking.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Orphei Drängar possesses a combination of power, energy, and culture. Joy of discovery combined with professional technical and musical prowess.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
I think we are in the process of getting the word out, and we haven't done very well yet. But we are trying.
Esa-Pekka Salonen -
I feel that this is my artistic home, and I'm very happy to be a California artist together with many others who are not from here originally but who decided to make this the center of their activities. There's something about that that I find very inspiring and satisfying.
Esa-Pekka Salonen