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
Enough
Seats
Thing
Project
Never
Players
Think
Scary
Thinking
Projects
Barely
People
Player
Hall
Hear
Quietly
Play
Halls

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.
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Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.
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I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.
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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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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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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 sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.
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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.
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Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
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I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?
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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.
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In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
Esa-Pekka Salonen