Quote

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.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

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Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Think
Scary
Thinking
Projects
Barely
People
Player
Hall
Hear
Quietly
Play
Halls
Enough
Seats
Thing
Project
Never
Players

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
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My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
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I went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.
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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?
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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
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I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, slow would be the word.
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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.
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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
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We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.
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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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I think we are in the process of getting the word out, and we haven't done very well yet. But we are trying.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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There was this kind of mildly annoying mythology about conductor Like biker should riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, and wearing a sort of a leather suit.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.
Esa-Pekka Salonen