Born in Helsinki, the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen studied at the Sibelius Academy, and made his conducting debut with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1979.  He was Chief Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra  for ten years (1985-1995) and Director of the Helsinki Festival in 1995 and 1996. 2008/09 marks Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first season as the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor and last season as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

His appointment with the Philharmonia cements a relationship that dates back over 25 years. Esa-Pekka Salonen made his London conducting début with the Philharmonia Orchestra in September 1983 (when he was 25 years old), stepping in at the last minute for an indisposed Michael Tilson Thomas to conduct a now-legendary performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. The chemistry was immediate, and Salonen formed a strong bond with the players. He was offered the position of Principal Guest Conductor, which he held from 1985-1994, and he has returned to conduct the Orchestra on a regular basis ever since. Some of the Philharmonia’s most ambitious and important projects during this time, from Clocks and Clouds (Ligeti, 1996) to Related Rocks (Magnus Lindberg, 2001-2), have taken place under his artistic leadership.

This season, Esa-Pekka Salonen continues this tradition of pioneering projects with the Philharmonia Orchestra. He opened the season with concerts in London and Germany, including a gala performance of Stravinsky’s extraordinary neo-classical opera-oratorio Oedipus rex at the Orchestra’s London home, Southbank Centre (‘…Salonen balanced all the components, and the orchestral commentary, with implacable theatricality. ’Andrew Clements, The Guardian, September 2008).   His nine-month exploration of the music and culture of Vienna, City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935, opened in February 2009 and will see him performing concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 18 major European cities. A unique co-production between the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Vienna Konzerthaus, the project involves partnerships with galleries and museums in Vienna and London, and presents the music of Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Berg in its historical and social context, alongside the art, craft, design, architecture, literature, philosophy and science of the period. The project culminates with semi-staged performances of Berg’s Wozzeck, with Simon Keenlyside in the title role, in October 2009.

Salonen has been Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1992. Highlights have included residencies at the Salzburg Festival, Köln Philharmonie and at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, as well as numerous European tours and guest performances in Japan. In November 2007, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic toured Europe with concerts in London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon. The programme focused on Sibelius, honoring the 50^th anniversary of the composer’s death, and also presented works by Salonen, Saariaho and Stucky.

In Los Angeles, major projects include a semi-staged production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, directed by Peter Sellars, with video artist Bill Viola and produced as a co-production with the Paris National Opera, and a festival focusing on music composed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, presented in honour of the 20th anniversary of his début with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s guest conducting engagements in the current season include appearances with the NDR-Sinfonieorchester, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. With the Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen performs several concerts across the whole of Europe, among them Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam, Gothenburg, Vienna and Madrid. He has toured Asia with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October 2008.

Salonen is the recipient of many major awards including the Siena Prize by the Accademia Chigiana in 1993, the first conductor ever to receive the prize; in 1995 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Opera Award and in 1997 received the Society’s Conductor Award. In 1998 he was awarded the rank of Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In May 2003 he received an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy in Finland and in 2005 the Helsinki Medal. Musical America named Salonen as its "Musician of the Year 2006".

Esa-Pekka Salonen is renowned for his interpretations of contemporary music and has given countless premieres of new works. He has led critically acclaimed festivals of music by Berlioz, Ligeti, Schönberg, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky and Magnus Lindberg. In April 2006 he returned to Paris’s Opéra Bastille to conduct the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s new opera, Adriana Mater, having previously conducted the Finnish premiere of her first opera L’amour de loin in 2004. In August 2007, he conducted Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone in a production by Peter Sellars at the Helsinki Festival (first Finnish performance) before taking the production to the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm.

Salonen is artistic director of the Baltic Sea Festival, that he co-initiated in 2003. As an annual event in August in Stockholm and across the Baltic Sea region, it invites celebrated orchestras, conductors and soloists to promote unity and ecological awareness among the countries around the Baltic Sea.

Esa-Pekka Salonen records for Deutsche Grammophon. Releases include a disc of Salonen works performed with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and a DVD of Kaija Saariaho’s opera, L’Amour de loin with the Finnish National Opera as well as two CDs with Hélène Grimaud with works by Pärt and Schumann.

The first recording of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Salonen for Deutsche Grammophon (Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring - first CD recording ever at Walt Disney Concert Hall) was released in October 2006 and nominated for a Grammy in December 2007. After recording for Sony Classical for many years, Salonen has an extensive discography with repertoire ranging from Mahler and Revueltas to Magnus Lindberg and his own works.

Composer

Esa-Pekka Salonen (born Finland 1958) studied horn, composing and conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki during the 1970s and composing with Niccolò Castiglioni and Franco Donatoni in Italy. He initially considered himself to be a conducting composer, until in 1983 he undertook a performance of Mahler's third symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London at short notice and became a composing conductor virtually overnight.

Some twenty years later, alongside his international conducting career, Salonen has preserved his individual voice as a composer and each new work is eagerly awaited. His orchestral works are regularly performed and broadcast all around the world, and Floof and LA Variations have become established as modern classics. Two major retrospectives of his work - in Helsinki in March 2003 at Musica Nova and in Stockholm in October 2004 at the Stockholm International Composer Festival - have been presented to huge audiences and critical acclaim. A CD of five orchestral works is available on the Sony label (SK89158). Deutsche Grammophon, with whom Salonen has an exclusive recording contract, has released a portrait CD of his orchestral works performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer (CD 477 5375).

Salonen's first large scale orchestral work Concerto for saxophone and orchestra ('...auf den ersten blick und ohne zu wissen...') dates from 1980-81, when Salonen was studying in Milan with Niccolò Castiglioni. This was followed by Giro, which uses something of the same harmonic structure, and Floof, an experimental piece setting texts by the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. This ebullient and histrionic tour de force for soprano and small ensemble won the UNESCO Rostrum prize in 1992 and has been widely performed and broadcast in Europe and the USA.

Ten years were to pass before Salonen had the time to complete another large-scale piece, although he did continue to work on a series of solo works entitled Yta (surface), and a pair of virtuoso duos entitled Meeting and Second Meeting, the latter forming the basis for Mimo II for oboe and small orchestra, written in 1992.

It was in 1996 that Salonen took time out from his conducting schedule to compose a major orchestral piece, LA Variations, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he has been Music Director since 1992. The piece had a triumphant premiere in January 1997, and has since proved to be one of the most popular orchestral works of recent decades. LA Variations marked the start of a newly fertile composing life. In June 1997 Salonen made extensive revisions to Giro; the new version was premiered at the Avanti! Summer Sounds Festival in Finland. Another orchestral work, Gambit, was composed in 1998 as a 40th birthday present for his compatriot and great friend Magnus Lindberg; this was followed a year later by Five Images After Sappho, a song-cycle for soprano and ensemble co-commissioned by the Ojai Festival, California and the London Sinfonietta.

In order to devote more time to composition, Salonen took a year's sabbatical from conducting in 2000, during which time he composed the Concert Etude for solo horn, Dichotomie for solo piano, the cello concerto Mania for Anssi Karttunen and London Sinfonietta, and his first choral work - Two Songs to Poems of Ann Jäderlund for the Swedish Radio Choir.

The virtuosic Stockholm Diary for string orchestra was commissioned by the Stockholm Concert Hall Foundation for the Stockholm Phiharmonic Orchestra and Stockholm Chamber Orchestra to mark the occasion of Esa-Pekka Salonen's Composer Portrait at the Konserthuset in Stockholm October 2004.

Since his sabbatical Salonen has completed further works for symphony orchestra - Foreign Bodies (2001), commissioned by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Insomnia (2002), co-commissioned by Suntory Hall, Tokyo and Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Hamburg, Wing on Wing (2004), which received its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall in June 2004, and was a gift from the composer to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in honour of their new home, and Helix (2005), which was commissioned by the BBC Proms. In February 2007 Salonen conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of his first piano concerto, dedicated to Yefim Bronfman who also premiered it. This concerto was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, the BBC, Radio France and NDR Hamburg, the first European performance took place at the BBC Proms in London in July 2007. In November 2008, Deutsche Grammophone has released a new CD with Salonen’s piano concerto and his works Helix and Dichotomie. At the beginning of 2008 the Johannes String Quartet premiered Salonen’s string quartet Homunculus. He is currently writing a violin concerto for Leila Josefowicz which will be premiered in April in Los Angeles.