by Alex Ross
The rise of the L.A. Philharmonic was a more unexpected development. For much of the century, it had been considered an ensemble of the second rank—“not too much more than a glorified community orchestra,” one veteran player told me. It was founded in 1919 by William Andrews Clark, Jr., the son of one of Montana’s Copper Kings. Clark was a skilled amateur violinist, a collector of books and manuscripts (including a copious array of materials relating to Oscar Wilde), and an attentive companion to various handsome young men whom he had rescued from society’s margins. In the thirties, the Philharmonic achieved distinction under the stern direction of Otto Klemperer, but the best orchestras in town belonged to the movie studios, where so many refugees from Hitler found employment. After the war, the Philharmonic subsided into an era of sleepy stasis, its finances in constant crisis. In the orchestra’s archives, I found a forlorn report for the year 1963, showing a $125,000 deficit on a less than million-dollar budget.
The orchestra decided that it would have to take some risks. First, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the wife of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, raised money for what promised to be a splendid new concert hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Second, the orchestra appointed its first whiz-kid music director—the twenty-six-year-old Zubin Mehta. And, most important, in 1969 it hired as its managing director Ernest Fleischmann, who, as the manager of the London Symphony, had made a name for himself as a hot-tempered revolutionary in the classical world, preaching the message that the modern orchestra could no longer run through the same old repertory for aging subscribers. It would have to become a more adaptable organism—a “community of musicians,” Fleischmann later said, able to perform new-music and chamber concerts, make school appearances, and play all kinds of repertory. It would also have to submit to the will of a strong manager.
After a period of excitement, there was another tapering off. Mehta left for the New York Philharmonic. The Chandler Pavilion turned out to be acoustically deadening. Carlo Maria Giulini and Andre Previn had relatively short regimes—the first widely revered, the second inconsistent. Fleischmann, who was born to Jewish parents in Germany and grew up in South Africa, saw the need for a second revolution. He would require another hall and another conductor, both of a new kind. “We don’t want a temple of culture—rather, a welcoming kind of place,” Fleischmann said of the projected hall in 1988. A competition was held, and the winner was Frank Gehry, at that time a much talked about but underemployed deconstructionist, who, in the seventies, had contributed modifications to the Philharmonic’s summer home, the Hollywood Bowl. As for the conductor, he would have to be a thinker as well as a virtuoso.
In 1983, on a flight from Marseilles to London, Fleischmann encountered an artist manager who told him that some Finnish singers had been raving about a young conductor with a funny name that he couldn’t remember. Fleischmann spent the night in London before flying on to Los Angeles, and while there he learned that a man named Esa-Pekka, obviously the funnily named conductor in question, had been engaged at the last minute to conduct Mahler’s gargantuan Third Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
“This was a Monday,” Fleischmann told me at lunch, in his gravelly, courtly accent. “I had meetings scheduled on Tuesday with some L.A. City Council people—grant proposal, that kind of thing. We needed the money. Halfway through the plane flight home, I thought to myself that I had made a terrible mistake. I should have stayed to hear the Finn. I couldn’t ask the pilot to turn the plane around, so I went to my meetings on Tuesday and then on Wednesday I flew back to London. I heard Esa-Pekka’s performance of the Mahler Third, and I was totally blown away. I went around backstage to meet him, and there was this guy with a can of beer in his hand, in short sleeves, and I thought he must be all right.”
Salonen is characteristically wry when he recalls his first American visit, which took place in 1984, at Fleischmann’s invitation. “I was a very European product,” Salonen says. “By any measure, I was a piece of vintage Eurotrash.” After conducting the Philharmonic in a program that included Witold Lutoslawski’s turbulent Third Symphony—“I suppose that you know the Lutoslawski notation” was his unpromising salutation to the orchestra at the first rehearsal—Salonen let himself be taken out to a club by a staff member. After standing in a corner, he mustered the courage to approach an attractive woman who was sitting at the bar. She asked what he was doing in the city. “Well, I just conducted the L.A. Philharmonic,” he said. “That’s the dumbest line I ever heard,” she said, and walked away.
This is a familiar genre of Salonen anecdote, in which the protagonist assumes an attitude of self-importance and then collides with reality. “In one presidential election in Finland,” he told a group of friends at dinner, “I was actually a write-in candidate.” He paused while eyebrows were respectfully raised. “I received, in fact, two votes, just behind Donald Duck.”
From 2002 until 2009, when he moved with his family to London, Salonen lived in a white-walled, modern place in Brentwood. When I stopped by, he told me how the pianist Mitsuko Uchida once visited his home studio, which contained a Steinway piano that once belonged to the emigre conductor Bruno Walter. “Of course, I was very proud of this piano,” Salonen said. “And so I said to Mitsuko”—he lowers his voice the interval of a fifth and brings out the Anglo element in his accent—“‘You really have to try my piano. It used to belong to Bruno Walter.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ Mitsuko said. She sat down, played a couple of things, and stopped. ‘Esa-Pekka! Yuck!”’
These gestures of self-deprecation can go only so deep. Sheepish fellows do not become directors of major orchestras. Salonen’s cool sometimes shades into coolness, even steeliness. He avoids gushing approval—“Very good!” is high praise from him—and he can cause agitation in subordinates by saying something like “That’s actually not OK” and then falling silent. He lacks the American gift for filling in the holes in a conversation with reassuring blather, and one learns not to hear his silences as awkward pauses. He likes to cite an adage of his homeland: a Finnish introvert looks at his own shoes, while a Finnish extrovert looks at other people’s shoes.
Salonen was born to middle-class, music-loving parents in 1958. When he was four, his mother tried to get him to play the piano, and he “refused point blank,” he says, “because it was very clear to me that girls play piano and boys play the soccer.” (He has now revised his opinion: “Girls can play the soccer as well.”) He eventually started playing the French horn, because, an older musician told him, it was easier to get into an orchestra as a horn player. But it was the experience of hearing Messiaen’s sublimely over-the-top Turangalîla, at the age of ten or eleven, that inflamed his desire to compose.
In the seventies, many Finnish composers were still writing brooding symphonies in the spirit of Sibelius, although some had fastened on to twelve-tone writing and other advanced techniques. By the time Salonen enrolled in composition and conducting classes at the Sibelius Academy, the country’s main music school, he was eager to preach the gospel of the difficult; at one point, he wrote a paper on “the defeat of tonalism,” and once disrupted a school party by putting on an LP of Boulez’s very modern but not particularly danceable Le Marteau sans maître.
At the Sibelius Academy, Salonen fell in with a cadre of teenage avant-gardists, among them Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho. They formed a collective called Korvat auki, or Ears Open!, and began putting on concerts of new music for the people, at which the people did not always consent to appear. One legendary evening, devoted to the Argentine-German conceptual composer Mauricio Kagel, drew an audience consisting of two elderly ladies who had come by mistake; another attracted a janitor, his dog, and the mother of one of the composers, or so the story goes. Lindberg’s youthful orchestral work Kraft, which includes an array of junk-metal percussion in its continuously seething orchestral textures, had its premiere on a nutty program that also featured the illustrious mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza performing Handel arias. Berganza was
forced to sing “Ombra mai fù” while auto parts, office-chair legs, and other metal objects dangled on wires behind her, waiting to be banged in the noise symphony to follow. “Only the extreme is interesting,” Lindberg would say. Salonen agreed.
The Ears Open! composers have since moved away from the sonic edge. Their music is now less hard-nosed, more lyrical, more spacious, although it hardly counts as easy listening. Salonen has devised a personal vocabulary in which he customarily uses hexachords, or scale fragments made up of six notes; when all six sound together, ear-cleansing dissonances can result, although he likes to tease tonal melodies out of the material. He revealed a lyrical bent in 1999, in a song cycle called Five Images After Sappho, written for Dawn Upshaw. Wing on Wing, a vocal-orchestral work from 2004, evokes the swooping forms of Disney Hall itself, incorporating recorded samples of Frank Gehry’s voice. There’s a section toward the end of the score in which Gehry is heard saying “Go to the beginning,” in a brief repeating loop, while drones and trills bubble up from the lower regions of the orchestra. Salonen seems to have followed this instruction in several recent pieces, sculpting rough-hewn melodies and forms that give elemental weight to fantastically sophisticated textures.
Just what role California played in Salonen’s musical development remains to be determined by his official Finnish biographer. (The composer claims to be approaching what he calls, in an approximate translation from the Finnish, the “shitting deaf mute,” or elderly notable, stage of his career, and therefore requires a biography.) Certainly, his work as a conductor and his residence in Los Angeles gave him new influences. Pulsating, pop-inflected rhythms can be heard in works such as Foreign Bodies and Helix. For a while, he listened to rock on his way home after concerts, letting his twentysomething drivers pick the CDs. He was impressed by Radiohead’s OK Computer, and once went out for drinks with members of the band, although he had reservations about Kid A and Amnesiac. (“Too much ostinato crescendo,” he told me.) Like most thinking people, he admires Björk, although at the gym he prefers Shakira. While he admits that most other pop music either baffles or bores him, he remains open to the idea that a pop album could floor him as OK Computer did, and wants to release similar forces in his own music, a mixture of the brainy and the visceral.
Salonen steeped himself in the culture of the Los Angeles émigrés—the throng of composers, musicians, writers, artists, and filmmakers who moved to neighborhoods like West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades in the thirties and forties. He found out where Brecht lived, and Thomas Mann, and Rachmaninov, and, of course, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. (Salonen once considered buying Stravinsky’s old house, on North Wetherly Drive, but he was spooked by the fact that there were still indentations on the carpet where the composer’s piano had stood.) The emigres fell into roughly two categories: those who Americanized themselves, such as Frederick Kohner, who wrote the novel Gidget and helped to codify surfer slang; and those who stayed aloof, such as Theodor Adorno, who sat in his house on South Kenter Avenue and pondered the interchangeability of totalitarianism and capitalism.
Salonen falls somewhere comfortably in the middle. His music threads together the aristocratic complexity of his European musical training and the blunt energy of his longtime California home. Plain chords come up against seething textures; a melody dances in and floats away. His conversation follows a similar cultural spiral. In front of an audience at Disney Hall in January 2007, he spoke briefly about Mahler’s Seventh Symphony and Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; the progression from late-Romantic opulence to early modern austerity, he said, resembled the collapse of a giant star into a white dwarf. As he was unfurling this metaphor, he paused to note, “White Dwarf was actually what I was called on my school hockey team.”
Salonen had his path mapped out from the moment he arrived in Los Angeles. When I first met him, in 1994, he told me, “There’s this crowd who go to contemporary-art exhibitions and see art cinema—people who basically use their brains more than average people. But they don’t come to classical-music concerts. It’s a problem of perception. They don’t see an orchestra as part of the contemporary art scene. It’s not a conversation item in their circles, because symphony orchestras play Beethoven and audiences are eighty-five years old. Now people are realizing that the Philharmonic is moving into this century.” In other words, he was aware of the problem of the culturally aware non-attender well before experts coined the phrase.
In the early years, the theory was better than the execution. Players recall a withdrawn young man who was inaudible in rehearsal and difficult to talk to afterward. Insistent programming of thorny European scores by Lutoslawski, Berio, and Ligeti led to a drop in attendance. A couple of years in, members of the orchestra met with him and urged him to pay more attention to the subscribers’ taste. If the usual story had unfolded, Salonen would have either caved in or gone back to Europe, muttering about the backwardness of the Americans. Instead, he stubbornly persisted, although he became savvier about mixing old and new in his programs. Fine-tuning an old Boulez strategy, he emphasized what he called “twentieth-century classics”-pieces such as the Rite and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra—next to which a modern work by Ligeti or Lindberg or Steven Stucky, the orchestra’s longtime composer-in-residence, made intuitive sense.
Gehry’s new concert hall was crucial to Salonen’s calculations, but for some years it seemed as though it might never be built. After ground was broken, in December 1992, projected costs mounted into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and few donors came forward to augment the original fifty-million-dollar gift from Lillian Disney, Walt Disney’s widow. (The Disney Company has no connection to the hall, nor do most major Hollywood players; the Philharmonic has long been the province of old-money families from Pasadena.) Fleischmann and Salonen pressed ahead. In 1996, Salonen told Mark Swed, the chief classical-music critic of the Los Angeles Times, “Somehow I’ve ruled out the option of the hall not happening.”
Fleischmann retired in 1998. Two years later, following a confusing interregnum involving a Dutch executive, Borda, a diminutive, propulsive Manhattanite, arrived. Salonen had sought her out, and at first she seemed an odd choice. She was at that time the executive director of the New York Philharmonic, a wealthier and more conservative institution. “It was like being president of Harvard, which I did not at first realize was not necessarily a good thing,” Borda says. She’d had an often combative relationship with Kurt Masur, who was then the orchestra’s music director. Earlier in her career, she had thrived in offbeat settings, managing a new-music ensemble in Boston and working alongside Edo de Waart and John Adams at the San Francisco Symphony, but in New York she felt as if a box were closing in on her. “Esa-Pekka brought me back to life,” she says. “This orchestra saved me.”
Like Fleischmann before her, Borda is a formidable executive who runs the orchestra like a lean company, not like a flabby nonprofit. She is aggressive when she needs to be, as she proved when she snatched Gustavo Dudamel away from a half-dozen orchestras interested in retaining his services. She has put the organization on solid financial footing. When it moved to Disney Hall, in 2003, it actually expanded its operations, posting a one-year sales increase of 62 percent. The nightly sellouts of the first Disney season couldn’t be sustained, but in the spring of 2007 the Philharmonic was still selling a very respectable 92 percent of its tickets. It depends less on charitable contributions than most big-league orchestras do; 75 percent of its $84 million 2007 budget was derived from regular-season ticket sales and other income, such as the lucrative summer season at the Hollywood Bowl. There has been a conspicuous lack of tension between the players and the management.
Yet, despite the on-message, on-budget managerial ethos, the L.A. Philharmonic remains an unpredictable place, still the most experimental of American orchestras. One crucial member of the staff is Chad Smith, a native of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who began his career as an operatic tenor of the fair-hair
ed, dashing type and then took a sharp left turn into progressive music programming. He is now the vice president of artistic planning, which means that he is in charge of shaping the programs and cultivating visiting musicians. “I spent a couple of years listening to Esa-Pekka,” Smith says, “and got the sense that the thinking always needed to be bigger, not big in scale but big in imagination. That’s how we started thinking about minimalism.”
The Minimalist Jukebox festival, which happened in the spring of 2006, was originally supposed to be a relatively conventional series of programs linking minimalist composers and earlier classical repertory—say, Steve Reich and Bach. But this seemed too boring for Disney Hall. What emerged instead was a two-week festival that ranged from classic minimalist pieces by Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass to postminimal-ist works such as Michael Gordon’s Decasia and Glenn Branca’s Hallucination City, a symphony for a hundred electric guitars. The series kicked off with an all-night show by the Orb, a British group that plays ambient house music. Subscribers fled en masse, exchanging their tickets for other series, but the empty seats were filled by new, much younger listeners. The festival came close to breaking even, despite the fact that some ticket prices had been reduced to accommodate a less genteel crowd.
