Esa-Pekka Salonen: A Conductor at the Top, and at a Crossroads

On a late afternoon in May, pop and classical music luminaries gathered in the neo-Gothic sanctuary of a 19th-century church-turned-Soho House in Stockholm. With drinks in hand, they listened as the media personality Cilla Benkö asked Esa-Pekka Salonen, “So what’s going on in your head at the moment?”

“Well, I’m at a crossroads,” said Salonen, the composer and conductor, who is a year away from becoming a free agent for the first time in decades. “I’m kind of figuring out what to do, if anything.”

Salonen is in a good position to choose what comes next. He is a conductor at the top of his field, and the kind of composer who can bring on not just one high-profile commissioner but several for each new piece he writes. The day after his interview with Benkö, he received the Polar Music Prize, an honor that has been called the Nobel Prize of music, directly from the hands of the Swedish king.

The award is given to a classical and a pop artist annually; Salonen’s counterpart was Nile Rodgers, the mind behind songs like “We Are Family” and “Le Freak” and albums by Madonna, David Bowie and Beyoncé. Guests at the ceremony included the royal family, the megaproducer Max Martin and a member of ABBA, all gathered for a televised evening of tributes and black-tie diners dancing in the aisles to music related to the prize winners.

With royalty grooving to Daft Punk but also listening attentively to Salonen’s “Concert Étude for Solo Horn,” it was a fitting celebration for Salonen, one of the most open-minded, open-eared and fundamentally cool artists in classical music, who at 66 is beloved and respected across the field.

“It’s kind of impossible to imagine this industry without his incredibly huge influence over the past decades,” the violinist Leila Josefowicz, a frequent collaborator, said in an interview later. “Whether it’s the compositions he’s written or the contributions he’s made to other composers, he’s a giant and a superhero.”

Salonen has been compared to Pierre Boulez, an earlier composer-conductor with lofty visions for the art form. (Salonen, though, is less prickly.) When he leaves his post as music director of the San Francisco Symphony next year, after an excruciatingly public break with the orchestra’s board, he could do pretty much whatever he wants.

“I’m not rushing into anything,” Salonen said in an interview. “I just want to get my priorities right. When I was in my 30s or 40s, I was like, OK, I’ll do this and see how it goes. Now, with a bit of luck there’s still time, but it doesn’t feel unlimited like it does to someone who’s 25.”

A BIT OF LUCK is also how Salonen describes how he got to where he is today. He was born in Helsinki, Finland, to working-class parents; his mother, thinking he might have some innate musical talent, tried to get him started with piano lessons at 4. He said no, thinking that his future was in ice hockey. “She was wise enough,” he recalled, “not to push.”

Several years later, he heard the Finnish pop singer Kirka’s version of the “Ode to Joy” on the radio. Fascinated, he looked up Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, where the tune comes from, in his father’s record collection, then listened and thought, “This is the most amazing thing.”

By that time, his mother was as a server at what Salonen described as a “posh restaurant,” where she befriended an elderly widower who asked her to become his housekeeper. The aristocratic brother of Finland’s president during World War II, he became Salonen’s godfather and facilitated his entry to the experimental, top-ranked school Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu. It was an elite institution but, unlike similar schools in the United States, was free except for a couple hundred dollars in fees.

Salonen took up music in earnest there and had access to some of the best teachers in the country. After graduating from recorder to trumpet, he switched to the horn because an upperclassman told him that, according to Robert Schumann, the horn was the soul of a symphony orchestra.

He got a new teacher, the principal horn of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, who had himself been taught by the principal horn of the Vienna Philharmonic, a friend of the musician who premiered Richard Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto. “All of the sudden,” Salonen said, “I got access to this kind of perspective.”

By the time he was 11, he knew that music was the profession for him. “I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I didn’t have some talent,” he said. “But I feel very lucky.” His future was secured with a precollege spot at the Sibelius Academy, where his teachers included the eminent composer Einojuhani Rautavaara and the conductor Jorma Panula. He took up the baton, he likes to say, mostly to lead his own music and works by now-famous classmates and friends, like Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg, in concerts with an anarchic spirit. Salonen remembers those performances as having been attended by tens of people.

Quickly, though, Salonen and his peers entered the establishment. By his mid-20s, Salonen had conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, where he would eventually become the music director, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he would also later lead. His first full-time job was conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

He went on to build an enormous discography that includes his own works, as well as an expansive repertoire with much lesser-known and contemporary music. (Next up, the premiere recording of Saariaho’s opera “Adriana Mater,” from San Francisco.) Salonen’s interpretations of the classics, though, crackle with vitality and interpretive insight that, it seems, was there from the start and continues to this day.

Along the way, he became a favorite among listeners, critics and fellow musicians. The choreographer Alonzo King, with whom Salonen has collaborated on projects including Ravel’s “Mother Goose” at the San Francisco Symphony in June, said that some conductors need to work to win over audience members. But, he added, “at Esa-Pekka’s performances, people are ready. You feel it in the air, like it’s going to rain. There’s an electrical stir.”

Players feel that, too. “There’s a ferocity in his music-making that is so raw, and that is so rare because it’s so brutally honest at all times,” said the flutist Claire Chase, who was hired by the San Francisco Symphony as a collaborative partner when Salonen was appointed. “It’s actually quite difficult to not play your best with him.”

Salonen balances the standard repertoire with a tendency to push boundaries, both on and offstage, and a canny ability to prod institutions. He worked closely with the architect Frank Gehry to build Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003. That same year, motivated by a blend of ecology, politics and music, he founded the Baltic Sea Festival, where he will conduct the opera “Khovanshchina” there this month. At the Colburn School, the conducting program that he leads was just endowed in perpetuity.

He oversaw a virtual-reality project at the Philharmonia that gave audience members an opportunity to embed in the orchestra. In 2014, he was featured in an Apple commercial that showed him weaving the iPad into his daily work. During the pandemic, he and the San Francisco Symphony’s collaborative partners worked on “Throughline,” a piece by Nico Muhly designed so thoroughly for digital media, it couldn’t be played live.

“I just wanted something to be honest, something that would be good and would not feel like a substitution,” Salonen said of the piece. “The moment we move beyond just really distributing existing material in a different way to actually creating new art for the new medium, then things are going to get really interesting.”

SALONEN’S TENURE in San Francisco started in 2020, with the promise of building on his ambitions in a city that has become synonymous with innovation. Even the idea of hiring collaborative partners was radical, defying the maestro myth to welcome perspectives from the worlds of avant-garde and popular music, as well as technology.

“We had all kinds of thoughts and ideas about what could be and what might be,” said Matthew Spivey, the orchestra’s chief executive. But earlier this year, Salonen stunned the classical music world by announcing that he would leave when his contract expires in 2025. In a moment of rare candor for the field, he explained why: “I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.”

The orchestra was staring down budget cuts that made Salonen’s ambitions for it untenable. Collaborative partners were quietly done away with. Open seats couldn’t be offered to new musicians at competitive salaries. Ominously, there was talk of programming that prioritized audience growth over artistic integrity.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Chase said. “Esa-Pekka had a vision that was absolutely achievable, but we lost the opportunity to see that vision actualized.”

Players didn’t want Salonen to leave. For the rest of the season, they handed out fliers to audience members that accused management of having “no clear artistic vision.” In June, a concertgoer held up a sign in Finnish that criticized the board with a harsh expletive, a sight practically unheard-of in concert halls.

During that time, Salonen said, he and the orchestra found that “to be onstage performing music is actually a sanctuary, where we can do what we are supposed to be doing.” He was also touched by the public’s response. Around San Francisco, people would stop him at coffee shops and bars to express sadness and gratitude.

“We in this classical music industry sometimes wonder what we’re doing in this bubble,” he said. “But this tells us that it actually matters that there’s a symphony orchestra in a town. We are the good guys, in the cultural side of things. We are constructive forces of society, and it’s nice to be reminded of that.”

So, what now? Within five minutes of the announcement that he was leaving San Francisco, Salonen had the first of many job offers. At the moment, he’s not interested in taking on another orchestra, but there are many other ways to remain active. He is working on a horn concerto for Stefan Dohr of the Berlin Philharmonic, and he is considering writing his first opera.

Chase said that Salonen’s ideas for the field are “more porous and ultimately more powerful than institutions”; there’s a possibility that his work as a freelancer could evolve into something more project-based, with orchestral partners worldwide. When he was at the Soho House in Stockholm, he told Benkö, the interviewer, that it was kind of odd to see his old classmates start to retire.

“They’re growing organic carrots somewhere, and that’s nice, but I’m not interested in that yet,” Salonen told her. “I’m going to do something, but I haven’t quite decided what.”