They're honoring the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prizes this week, but there are a number of human endeavors the Nobels don't cover. Music composition is one of them, and in the breach there is the University of Louisville's prestigious Grawemeyer Award, whose founder once mused that such a prize might mean "perhaps we could find another Mozart." Its latest winner is Esa-Pekka Salonen, who for 17 years held the baton at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But the Grawemeyer honors what he did with a pen -- or a computer mouse, or both: the "Violin Concerto" he composed in his last months in L.A. He's taking his concerto on tour, from Boston to Hamburg. Salonen now heads the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, but he zipped back to L.A. for another turn at the podium, conducting the premiere of a nearly 80-year-old opera fragment -- and taking a bow for the Grawemeyer.
Patt Morrison Asks: Noteworthy, Esa-Pekka Salonen
Op-Ed
Esa-Pekka Salonen, who held the baton at the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years, has won the prestigious 2012 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for 'Violin Concerto,' which he composed just before leaving L.A.
That's some honor. What does it mean for you and the Philharmonic?
The list of previous recipients is like my house gods -- Witold Lutoslawski, John Adams, Pierre Boulez -- and then of the younger ones, many are very close friends and people I admire most in the world of composition. It's an important prize in its way, and it's not coincidental that they decided to give out awards in categories the Nobel Prize doesn't cover.
This may be the first time in classical music that a heavy drum kit figures into the composition. How does something like this advance classical music?
I wouldn't dare to claim that one piece of music would radically push the envelope, but if you look at the history of the symphony orchestra, every generation has brought in new instruments, and the range of a symphony orchestra has been expanded by composers who want to explore new possibilities in terms of adding stuff. I'm not the first one to use a rock kit in a classical context, but I am fairly certain this is the first one in a concerto, so while it might not be unprecedented, it's very rare. And it fits in quite nicely, I have to say.
The concerto took nine months to compose.
That was not planned, by the way.
Like many other nine-month human undertakings.
In my case, it started with little sketches and thoughts on scraps of paper; once I had enough material, then I started getting [them to] Leila [Josefowicz, the soloist] for her to play and give me feedback in terms of the technicalities of violin playing.
Is it unusual to collaborate like that?
Not really. Most people today who write solo concertos for instruments they don't play themselves collaborate to some degree with the performer [so] that you don't write anything that goes against the nature of the instrument or is unplayable. What made it somewhat unusual is that we weren't physically in the same place because of her schedule and mine. So most of this was done on Skype. If I sent something on email, she would print it and then play a bit of it back to me over Skype. It's as if we were in the same room but we might have been on different continents -- and mostly, we were.
Where are you in the concerto? And where is Los Angeles in it?
I was so aware that the performance of the "Violin Concerto" was going to be [in] my penultimate week with the orchestra, and I was preparing for stepping down after 17 good years. I think it's the third movement with the rock kit and the dance energy where L.A. figures most. And I wrote in the program notes something like, "Hooray for freedom of expression, and thank you, guys."
By this I meant my own kind of liberalization process when I moved here. After a few years in L.A. I felt free from various dogmas and rules and taboos of the European modernism and the sort of hyper-intellectual rigor that was very much the [rule] in Europe. L.A. somehow liberated me from all that. That was unbelievably important in my own development, because finally I had the possibility of becoming the kind of composer I wanted to become.
And I'm not the only one who has had this experience in California. This is a good place to find oneself because of the open-mindedness of this place.
[In California] I learned a way to deal with people without being aggressive, and I learned that I get the best results out of an orchestra and an institution when they are motivated and we share the same goals rather than me trying to force my point of view.
When you lived in L.A., you had a chance to buy Igor Stravinsky?s house ? but didn?t.
What is it like to come back and conduct on your old home turf?
The first time I came back, after a hiatus of 18 months or so, I was kind of worried because I didn't know what to expect, whether it would feel strange or whether it would be overwhelmingly emotional. But when I walked in, the guy at the security desk said, "Hi, how have you been?"
And for me that was the greatest relief. I started working again from where I left it. There was no sense of weirdness or alienation; it was just normal.
