Salonen Returns with Something Old and Lots of New
/By Truman C. Wang
2/27/2022
Eska-Pekka Salonen (L), organist James McVinnie (R)
One of the many pleasures of resuming concert life post-Covid is seeing the return of beloved former Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, always adventurous and daring in his programming, to conduct the LA Phil in new works as well as old favorites.
The February 11 concert opened with the Preludio from Bach’s Partita No. 3, the violin soloist playing from top of the balcony, sending sweet, ethereal sounds throughout the auditorium. It was followed without pause by Salonen’s own composition, Fog (U.S. premiere of orchestral version) – effectively a contemporary, nebulous variation on the Bach piece, scored for a large orchestra. It paints a reimagined narrative, started by Bach 300 years ago and completed by Salonen in our uncertain dystopian world.
Two ‘nature’ works – Breathing Forests by Gabriela Smith (a world premiere) and Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss – were telling signs of how our views of nature have changed over time, from awe and poetry (Strauss) to suffocation and decay (Smith). It’s a high tribute to the LA Phil musicians for playing these two opposing works with the same dedication and virtuosity, producing some extraordinary orchestral effects in the process. Organists James McVinnie and Joane Pierce Martin gave thrilling performances in the Smith and Strauss works, respectively.
Esa-Pekka Salonen (L), Víkingur Ólafsson (R)
On February 20, Salonen returned to conduct Bartok and two Scandinavian works. The Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta was quite a show opener, featuring some exciting solo turns from the timpani, xylophone and the keyboard instruments. The boyish 38-year-old Norwegian pianist Víkingur Ólafsson was the soloist in Daniel Bjarnason’s new work, FEAST, inspired by Browning’s poetry, executed with passion and precision by the musicians and soloist.
Esa-Pekka Salonen is a well-known interpreter of Sibelius’ music and on this occasion gave a memorable reading of the Symphony No. 7. Starting from the Wagner-influenced C-Major scale ending in the ‘Tristan chord’, to the vivid dialogs of the woodwinds and strings, and finally to the glacier-like gravitas of the lower strings, the orchestral playing went from strength to strength, scaling impressive heights, in this fifteen-minute mini symphony. Even though Salone is now Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, I suspect he will remain a most welcomed sight (and sound) season after season here in LA.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.