Sony Classical Releases Salonen’s Cello Concerto

Courtesy of Sony Music Australia

Readers may recall that, when I was preparing my list of the “memorable recordings” I had encountered last year, I made a point to acknowledge Sony Classical’s 61-CD box set of all of its recordings made by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Those interested in the completeness of this anthology will now be disappointed. At the beginning of this month, Sony Classical released the world premiere recording of Salonen conducting his own cello concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and soloist Yo-Yo Ma. If the Amazon.com Web page for this item is accurate, demand has been high, because no CDs are currently in stock. A new batch is expected to be available on March 27.

Lasting a little over half an hour, the concerto was co-commissioned for Ma by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Barbican Centre, and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. Chicago enjoyed the right to world premiere with Salonen on the podium at a performance given on March 9, 2017. Sony Classical recorded the composition during a performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on February 8, 2018.

Salonen himself prepared the notes for the accompanying booklet, from which we learn that the concerto emerged from a diversity of ideas that had been percolating in his consciousness for several years. This is often the case for many composers, many of whom document such preliminary thoughts in sketchbooks. Salonen never mentions any such explicit documentation. If it exists, I suspect that, within a matter of decades, it will be put to use by some industrious graduate student’s thesis research.

For now, however, we shall just have to be content with our respective capacities for attentive listening. In the spirit of the 1959 essay by James Tenney discussed on this site this past Wednesday, Salonen is as attentive to building blocks involving rhythm, dynamics, and timbre as he is to issues of relations between dissonance and consonance and those between polyphony and melodic lines. Indeed, the very first impressions established at the beginning of the first movement are based heavily on texture, while the use of percussion in the final movement suggests an approach to a polyphony of rhythmic, rather than thematic, patterns. (Writing about last week’s performance of the concerto with Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and cellist Truls Mørk, San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman encapsulated the concerto with the sentence, “That’s the one with the bongos, right?”)

To be fair, however, from an information-theoretic point of view, the bandwidth of Salonen’s score is far too wide to be apprehended through a single listening experience, regardless of whether the experience comes from a recording or a concert hall. As a result, the new Sony Classical recording is likely to be a great asset for anyone planning to attend an actual performance of the concerto. Entering an auditorium with even a few basic points of orientation involving more than the instruments in the percussion section is likely to establish at least a few key expectations that will establish context for the overall listening experience. On the other hand, those of us who never get that opportunity will still have much to take away from listening to this new recording several times, since each such listening experience is likely to turn up intriguing details not previously encountered.