Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.

The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself.

I started conducting lessons and I realized that this is actually something I like doing.

I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

The classical music industry, has been an industry of covers. So we do covers, and if I compare this with the rock and pop side, what is the most exciting event?

The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.

It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.

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.

We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.

The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.

There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.

I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.

If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

I feel that this is my artistic home, and I'm very happy to be a California artist together with many others who are not from here originally but who decided to make this the center of their activities. There's something about that that I find very inspiring and satisfying.

I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.

As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.

I think we are in the process of getting the word out, and we haven't done very well yet. But we are trying.

If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.

Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.

Orphei Drängar possesses a combination of power, energy, and culture. Joy of discovery combined with professional technical and musical prowess.

If somebody had told me when I was starting composition in Helsinki in the '70s that I would end up in L.A. and to describe that journey, those 17 years with the philharmonic and building the hall and this and that, I would have said, "This is a fairy tale of the first order."

There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.

You know, in some ways conducting is counter-intuitive. It's like winter driving in Finland - if you skid, the natural reaction is to fight with the wheel and jam on the brakes, which is the quickest way to get killed. What you have to do is let go, and the car will right itself. It's the same when an orchestra loses its ensemble. You have to resist the temptation to semaphore, and let the orchestra find its own way back to the pulse.

Of course performing talent, that's clear. Maybe this is not so well-known among young people who are interested in music, who are talented in music, but they're trying to figure out how to go about it.

This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.

The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.

I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.

Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.

After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.

Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.