Salonen

A dead Mexican modernist helped me appreciate Esa Pekka Salonen. The first time I'd interviewed the now former L.A. Philharmonic conductor was for a story about Silvestre Revueltas when Salonen featured the composer in a festival of Latin American classical music six years ago.A couple of weeks ago Larry Mantle and I sat down with Salonen for an exit interview at his Disney Hall conductor's suite. Our chat ranged from funny stuff like missing concerts because of traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway and a 1994 article in the 'zine Ben is Dead that reads in part, "Girls are fainting, young men fanning themselves and squirming in their tweed jackets." (Salonen blushed and dismissed it) to serious topics like his future plans in L.A. and London and the paradigm shift Salonen's been pushing for as conductor and music director.

In the old model, as Salonen described it, the audience is something that's static, unchanging. The artist, whether creating a painting, performance or musical composition, creates and performs without regard to the audience. Salonen's been trying to demolish that model in favor of the Bertolt Brecht model, he said, in which the wall that separates the art and the spectator is dissolved. The audience matters and Salonen's been involved in a dance between himself and the audience in which he challenged people's expectations once they sat down at the concert hall.

That's where Revueltas comes in. Of the composer who died in Mexico in 1940 Salonen said six years ago, "He has got something that very few other composers have and this is the sort of integration of European, Western, traditional, classical music elements and folk music. And he managed to create a fusion that becomes his own voice."

I'd come across Revueltas as the older brother of Jose Revueltas, one of the intellectual leaders of the 1968 Mexico City student movement. And I'd heard his percussion-rich, Stravinsky-like compositions several times on Mexican television in the late 1970s. They had the quality of orchestral indigenous anthems.

Salonen had heard about Revueltas in Finland in the late 1970s but didn't really study his music until he came to the U.S. California's historic ties with Mexico and it's current cultural and Latino demographic shift motivated him, he said, to highlight Revueltas.

The interest in Revueltas, Salonen also said, came from a growing interest worldwide in classical music from the fringes. That is, from the countries that don't make up the old European canon. For 17 years Salonen pushed very open classical audiences in Los Angeles to hear new music, or, with his aide-de-camp director Peter Sellars, hear old music in a new context, staging, and setting.

Several people at one of his last performances last Thursday said they appreciated Salonen's approach but would have wanted a little more Brahms and Mozart (that comment came from a music appreciation teacher at an Orthodox Jewish, co-ed high school in the Fairfax District).

Now Salonen's replacement is a hot-shot, young Venezuelan conductor from those fringes mentored by some of the pillars of the old European canon. New conductor Gustavo Dudamel's not going to take a giant can opener to Disney Hall and let the notes flood the pupuserias and storefront churches of the Pico-Union district but he does stand to uphold Salonen's mission to change the public's first image of classical music from the busts of dead European composers to one of a complex, thought provoking, and fun experience.

Photo: Salonen Conducts. Credit: Mathew Imaging