Esa-Pekka Salonen to be Next SFS Music Director

Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (photograph by Andrew Eccles, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

This morning San Francisco Symphony (SFS) President Sakurako Fisher and Chief Executive Officer Mark C. Hanson announced that Esa-Pekka Salonen will become the ensemble’s next Music Director. His tenure will begin in September of 2020; and he will be the twelfth Music Director in the orchestra’s 107-year history. (It is perhaps worth inserting, at this point, that Salonen visited the SFS podium to lead SFS on the 100th anniversary of the day on which it gave its first performance, December 8, 1911.) Salonen will succeed Michael Tilson Thomas, whose 25-year tenure as Music Director will conclude in July of 2020.

Due to a scheduling conflict that arose this past October, San Francisco audiences will have their first opportunity to experience Salonen leading SFS next month. He will conduct the three concerts taking place from January 18 through January 20, replacing Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, who had to postpone her debut performances with SFS due to maternity/family leave following the birth of her first child. Salonen has changed the program originally planned for that week to one that will consist entirely of instrumental selections.

He will acknowledge his Finnish background with a performance of Jean Sibelius’ Opus 22, which he called his Lemminkäinen Suite, also known as Four Legends from the Kalevala. As might be guessed, each of the movements is based on a different runo (canto) from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. The best known of these is “The Swan of Tuonela,” based on Runo XIV, in which Louhi charges Lemminkäinen with the task of shooting the black swan that swims around Tuonela, the island of the dead. The movement is particularly known for its extended cor anglais solo.

Salonen will also present the SFS premiere of “METACOSMOS” by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Unless I am mistaken, this will be the first time that San Francisco audiences will be able to listen to Thorvaldsdottir’s music since San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performed her “In the Light of Air” in October of 2016. (However, Steven Schick, who conducted that performance, will be conducting her music with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Chamber Orchestra at the end of this coming February.) The remaining work on the program will be Richard Strauss’ Opus 30 tone poem, “Also sprach Zarathustra” (thus spoke Zarathustra), inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical discourse of the same name.

The three performances of this concert will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, January 18, and Saturday, January 19, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 20. Ticket prices range from $35 to $156, and they may be purchased through this concert’s event page, by calling 415-864-6000, or by visiting the Davies Box Office, whose entrance is on the south side of Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. The Box Office is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday.

On the longer scale of time, Salonen will be part of a plan to evolve SFS from the inside out by introducing a new artistic leadership model. That evolution will emerge through collaboration with eight partners from a variety of cultural disciplines. These partners will work with Salonen and SFS to embark on a future of experimentation by collaborating on new ideas, breaking conventional rules, and creating unique and powerful experiences in and around the concert experience. The group assembled comprises eight artists from varied creative realms:

1. pianist, film producer, and composer of award-winning film scores, Nicholas Britell
2. soprano and curator, Julia Bullock, who has made social consciousness and activism fundamental to her work
3. flutist, educator, and advocate for new and experimental music, Claire Chase
4. composer, new music curator, and member of The National, Bryce Dessner
5. violinist, musical director, and artistic trailblazer, Pekka Kuusisto
6. composer and genre-breaking collaborator, Nico Muhly
7. artificial intelligence entrepreneur and roboticist, Carol Reiley
8. jazz bassist and vocalist, Esperanza Spalding.

Salonen is no stranger to cross-disciplinary undertakings. One of his more impressive achievements during his tenure as Principal Conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London was his experimental re-rite project. The basic idea involved turning a recorded performance of Igor Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring” into an activity space. That space was provided by the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank, where the project filled all four stories of that warehouse building. The result was an interactive experience through which listeners would be exposed to the nature of performance in conjunction with the act of listening.