Quote

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

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Character
Festivals
Important
Hall
Think
Exclusive
Thinking
Royal
People
Halls
Hang
London
Festival
Nice
Inviting

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
I actually don't like this term, classic. It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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?
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.
Esa-Pekka Salonen