Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes
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This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.
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It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.
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Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
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If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.
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Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.
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When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.
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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
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I realized that the European dogma is not necessarily the only way to look at things.
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The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.
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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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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's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.
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I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.
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I like this idea of identification with the local team. I think it's great. That's what an orchestra should be. It's an orchestra for its hometown, and it serves the people.
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Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.
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I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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I went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.
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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
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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.
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In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
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I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.
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There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.
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This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.
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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.
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There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.
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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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If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.
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My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
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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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Of course performing talent, that's clear. Maybe this is not so well-known among young people who are interested in music, who are talented in music, but they're trying to figure out how to go about it.
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