24/25 season brings multiple performances of music by Esa-Pekka Salonen. In October 2024 his much-loved Cello Concerto can be heard under the composer’s baton with the Cleveland and San Francisco Symphony orchestras. The soloist will be the Finnish cellist Senja Rummukainen who also performs the work in April 2025, again with Salonen on the podium for The Salzburg Easter Festival with Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Senja Rummukainen © Eeva Suutari
Originally written for Yo-Yo Ma, Salonen says of the work;
I have never - not even during the quite dogmatic and rigid modernist days of my youth - felt that the very idea of writing a solo concerto would in itself be burdened with some kind of dusty bourgeois tradition. A concerto is simply an orchestral work where one or several instruments have a more prominent role than the others. A concerto does not suggest a formal design the same way a symphony does. I also happen to like the concept of a virtuoso operating at the very limits of what is physically (and sometimes mentally) possible. In Nietzsche’s words: "You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that.” (No programme note feels complete without a quotation from Thus Spake Zarathustra.)
In 2021 Salonen wrote his Sinfonia Concertante for organ and orchestra for not one but two organists, Iveta Apkalna and Olivier Latry, who both requested a piece from him at the same time. Each shared the commissioned performances, and both return to perform the work this season – Latry with Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Osmo Vanska in October 2024, Apkalna with Aarhus Symphony Orchestra and Pierre Bleuse in November 2024, and again in January 2025 with Salonen and Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Sinfonia Concertante performed by The NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and organist Iveta Apkalna
Written for NHK Symphony Orchestra in 2002, Insomnia occupies a darker and deeper place in his catalogue than Salonen’s preceding works Foreign Bodies and LA Variations. In December Dima Slobodeniouk conducts two performances with Munich Philharmonic.
Salonen's kínēma, written during the pandemic for Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and their principal clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist, has had several performances including by Anthony McGill and the New York Philharmonic. Sundqvist revisits the piece in December 2024 with its commissioner FRSO and Salonen who was unable to conduct the world premiere performance due to Covid. Eeva Mäenluoma will perform the work with Lahti Symphony Orchestra in April 2025.
...kínēma” isn’t unpleasant, and McGill was a stylishly reserved soloist, not one to impose himself even in virtuosic passages — his tone mellow yet direct, sweet and refreshing.
- Zachary Woolfe, New York Times
