Sinfonia concertante – the generic term does not mean opposing, but together: the friendly dialogue, if not the amorous fusion of one or more solo instruments with an orchestra. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra begins with an accompanying movement of the solo instrument in the treble. A flute part is soon added in a striding triple time, of which one does not know at first whether it comes from the pipework or from the ranks of the orchestra. Chains of trills from the organ bring artificial wooden birds to the scene, as we know them from Salonen’s piano concerto; the full orchestra works itself into a brightly colored ecstasy; after a quieter organ solo, the movement marked ‘Pavane and Drones’ dies to the glissandi of two violins, which descend from the dark ether like dying firecrackers. The middle movement, ‘Variations and Dirge’, is a mourning of figural work over long sweeping cantilenas; the finale, “Ghost Montage,” a Holstian Mars machine with cantus firmus interludes of hockey riffs. The whole thing, grandiose from the Wilhelminian era, doesn’t necessarily sound like Salonen’s most subtle hit after the first listen.
During the conversation in Paris, the composer once again emphasized that he had to free himself from the do’s and don’ts of the post-serial dogma guardians before he found his voice. The early works are worth listening to, but a touch epigonal: the brittle, cantabile Saxophone Concerto (1980) is reminiscent of works by the mature Boulez, the onomatopoeia setting “Floof” (1988) alludes humorously to Ligeti’s “Aventures”. “I lacked the compositional tools to develop myself further,” Salonen looks back. The Finn made his breakthrough in the years after moving to Los Angeles in 1992 – with the new version of the piece “Giro”, which was withdrawn in 1982, but above all with the “LA Variations”, which was performed around seventy times by important conductors and orchestras. “For the revision of ‘Giro’ I used a computer program that – fed with a group of tones – spits out a fundamental tone. This is determined using the overtone relationships of the tones fed in: a kind of musical genealogical research,” explains the composer.
Since that time, Salonen has had a compositional tool – harmonies based on overtone series – that serves him as a kind of substitute for the main trump card of tonality abandoned in the twentieth century: functional harmony based on modulation and cadence, that is, on progression from a pole of stability or, on the contrary, on clinging to it. Salonen’s overtone harmony is a means of spanning large formal arcs through tension and relaxation, danger and security, gloom and transparency – sustainable pillars for longer works whose dramaturgy is able to captivate even lay listeners.
Today the name “Salonen” stands for ten to thirty-minute compositions for large orchestra (sometimes plus instrumental soloists or choir singers): the ideal dance suite “Foreign Bodies”, the restless nocturne “Insomnia”, the concertos for piano, violin and cello, the Sea piece (including coloratura mermaids!) “Wing on Wing”, the mercury iridescent “Nyx”, the strangely exotic Hugo Ball setting “Karawane”, the sharply contrasted pair of twins “Castor” and “Pollux”. All of these works and many others are full of color and invention, pulsed with kinetic energy, rich in pictorial associations and delightfully orchestrated – rousing Kapellmeister music, to use a word that Salonen sees nothing pejorative about.
The Sinfonia concertante, which premiered in Katowice on January 13, will also be performed this season in the Berlin, Paris, Hamburg and Los Angeles philharmonic halls with the respective resident orchestras conducted by the composer. In Berlin he also trades as composer in residence. Salonen is just as much in demand as a composer as he is as a pacesetter – a double talent that can be compared with that of Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein, but above all with that of Pierre Boulez.