The Berlin Philharmonic has appointed Esa-Pekka Salonen as its new Composer-in-Residence. The Finnish conductor and composer will step into the function for the ensemble’s 2022-23 season. Throughout that season the orchestra will play a variety of Salonen’s music, from the colorful orchestral showpiece Helix (in late December) to the German premiere of his Organ Concerto (January 2023) and his michievous Dada-inspired piece for choir and orchestra Karawane (Could 2023).
Salonen is at the moment Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the Philharmonia in London, having served as its Principal Conductor and Inventive Advisor from 2008-2021. He’s at the moment in the midst of Multiverse Esa-Pekka Salonen, a two-season residency as each composer and conductor, at Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.
As a composer he’s recognized for writing music that manages to be directly playful and cerebral. And his output is extensively various, starting from this 1988 piece Floof (which Salonen describes as ‘the last word product of the electro-troubadour, set to dodecaphonic rap music.’) to his 2004 work Wing on Wing, impressed by the structure of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Live performance Corridor.
‘I would like music – and particularly my music – to be a part of society,’ says Salonen within the Berlin Philharmonic’s press launch. ‘What I can’t stand are individuals who take themselves too severely. There at all times needs to be room for irony and laughter, in any other case life could be insufferable.’
His first live performance in his new function with the Berlin Philharmonic will happen on twenty first December 2022.
Picture: Minna Hatinen/Finnish Nationwide Opera and Ballet
