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For a conductor only a week away from leading his orchestra into $274 million worth of brand-new real estate -- Walt Disney Concert Hall, home as of this week of the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- Esa-Pekka Salonen seems unexpectedly relaxed. Shoeless, black-T-shirted, folded into a sofa in his spacious office suite above the new hall, he looks -- as he always does, in fact -- like a healthy kid just blown in from a nearby glacier. There are no fears as he talks about his hopes -- for the new hall, for its impact upon his orchestra, his adopted city, or, for that matter, himself.
GREAT PERFORMANCES: The story is out, even before the opening-night gala concert, that you're quite satisfied with the hall: the look of the place and, more important, the sound.
Esa-Pekka Salonen: The sound, of course, was my greatest concern, but now I am totally happy, and so is the orchestra. Naturally, there were certain difficulties getting used to the sound -- the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat. Every day we make more progress toward understanding the hall.
GP: Suppose there are problems. Have Frank Gehry [the architect] and Yasuhisa Toyota [the acoustician] left you any leeway for making adjustments after you've been playing for a while?
ES: Yes, and we have already taken advantage of this. We found, for example, a certain detrimental echo in parts of the hall: you hit a certain note once but you heard it twice.
GP: You mean like Avery Fisher Hall, circa 1970?
ES: Exactly. So we found that certain spaces behind the orchestra were too reverberant, and so we were able to replace them with other material. We expect that there will also be problems next year, when the organ is fully operating, and we will have the means for solving them as well.
The beautiful thing about the hall is the realism of the sound. For example, we can place a single player anywhere -- down front or up in the balcony -- and that musician's playing will be perfectly audible. That gives us the chance to experiment with music that requires spatial effects; in fact, there's a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli on our opening program, music from 400 years ago that uses groups of brass instruments echoing one another over space.
GP: Is there other music that you'll be able to play in Disney Hall that wouldn't have worked in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion [the orchestra's previous home, just across the street from the new hall]?
ES: Yes, there's quite a lot. I've always wanted to perform Schoenberg's "Gurre Lieder," but I knew that a lot of the resonance of that huge music would have been lost at Dorothy Chandler. At the other end, the new hall will be wonderful for a lot of the classical repertory -- choral music, for example -- that wouldn't have worked nearly so well at the Chandler.
I love the new hall, truly love it. And the most important impact, to me, is the fact that our orchestra has now become important. It's not only that ticket sales have skyrocketed, it's the fact that people in Los Angeles, and outside Los Angeles as well, can take on a whole new awareness of what music can add to the quality of life. You can thank Frank Gehry for that, for designing a space, inside the hall and outside, that welcomes people to come, to hear some music, just to hang out.
GP: One final question. When you first came on the scene here, as a very young guest conductor of the Philharmonic back in 1984, you told me (and a few other people as well) that you really didn't want a career as a conductor, that composing was more important. Now you are recognized in both areas; how do you feel about your recognition since 1984 as one of the world's great conductors?
ES: That's a really good question, mainly because I don't know the answer. Composing is as important to me now as it was 20 years ago, and I still think -- as I did then -- that it's impossible to work on both sides simultaneously. There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will. I can only say now, which I couldn't have said in 1984: I love to conduct.
Interview by writer Alan Rich for GREAT PERFORMANCES Online. (Photos of Esa-Pekka Salonen by Todd Eberle [top] and Ann Johansson [left]/Los Angeles Philharmonic.)
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