On February 28 and March 2 and 3, the Houston Symphony welcomes violinist Jennifer Koh back to Jones Hall to play Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto. In this post, discover what makes this work a contemporary masterpiece. Get tickets and more information about the concerts here. (Header photo: Minna Hatinen / Finnish National Opera and Ballet)
Carrying on in the tradition of Strauss, Mahler, Bernstein and Boulez, Esa-Pekka Salonen has become one of the most successful composers and conductors of our time. A native of Finland, he is part of an extraordinary generation of musicians from that country which includes composers Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho as well as conductors Osmo Vänska and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Despite having a population of less than six million people, Finland has had an outsized impact on the classical music world thanks in part to its excellent education system (though originally from Peru, Jimmy López Bellido, the Houston Symphony’s current Composer-in-Residence, also studied in Finland).
The Pleasure Principle
Though Salonen attended conservatory at a time when academic musical institutions were dominated by high-modernist aesthetics, he and many other members of his generation later rebelled against the strictures of this style. For Salonen, his appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1992-2009) was pivotal for him as a composer. “Only after a couple of years here did I begin to see that the European canon I blindly accepted was not the only truth,” he said in a 2008 feature in the Los Angeles Times. “Over here, I was able to think about this rule that forbids melody. It’s madness. Madness!”
While Salonen has still remained far from the diatonic tunes of Puccini, his music has increasingly appealed to the senses with shimmering harmonies, intricate textures and propulsive rhythms. “My focus moved from an ideological principle to a pleasure principle,” he explained.
Composed between June 2008 and March 2009, his Violin Concerto exemplifies his mature style. A co-commission of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and New York City Ballet (which later presented a choreographed version of the piece), the work was written for the violinist Leila Josefowicz, a champion of new music. “Leila Josefowicz turned out to be a fantastic partner in this process,” Salonen wrote in his own note for the piece. “She knows no limits, she knows no fear, and she was constantly encouraging me to go to places I was not sure I would dare to go. As a result of that process, this Concerto is as much a portrait of her as it is my more private narrative, a kind of summary of my experiences as a musician and a human being at the watershed age of 50.”
The Music
The concerto is organized in four movements, the first of which is titled Mirage. It begins with the soloist alone, playing fast, gossamer runs “as if the music had been going on for some time already.”
The delicate sounds of harp, celesta, glockenspiel and vibraphone accompany the soloist’s perpetual motion until the lower strings enter—“the sound is dark and resonant.” Salonen employs a visual metaphor for this change of texture: “Suddenly we zoom in to maximum magnification.” The soloist’s light, almost Mendelssohnian music alternates with this “dark and resonant” music as we “zoom out again, and back in after a while.” This process builds to “some impossibly fast music” for the soloist and then fades away to a brief cadenza composed by Leila Josefowicz. The cadenza exclusively uses harmonics, airy notes produced by barely touching the instrument’s strings.
The final harmonic leads directly into the second movement, titled Pulse I. “All is quiet, static,” Salonen wrote. “I imagined a room, silent: all you can hear is the heartbeat of the person next to you in bed, sound asleep. You cannot sleep, but there is no angst, just some gentle, diffuse thoughts on your mind. Finally the first rays of the sun can be seen through the curtains, here represented by the flutes.”
The “pulse” of the title can perhaps be heard in the dull throb of the timpani, which underlies the entire movement. Interestingly, this is not the only music by Salonen related to sleeplessness; in 2002 he wrote an orchestral piece entitled Insomnia. Like the first movement, Pulse I ends with another harmonic cadenza by Josefowicz.
The following movement, Pulse II, provides a stark contrast with the uneasy quiet of the preceding movement. “The pulse is no longer a heartbeat,” Salonen explains. “This music is bizarre and urban, heavily leaning towards popular culture […]” In a video interview for the Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen was more specific. “I’ve always been fascinated by the sheer velocity and accuracy of the best rock drummers, and I always thought it would be nice to have some of that in a symphony orchestra,” he said. “So I thought ‘OK, one day I’ll include a [drum] set in a piece of mine,’ and I thought it would actually make a lot of sense in this piece, because the violin is the one instrument that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that kind of world, and I thought it would create an interesting juxtaposition.”
In terms of sheer excitement and virtuosity, this movement is the highpoint of the concerto, blending the rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll with those of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. “The violin is pushed to its very limits physically,” Salonen wrote in his note. “Something very Californian in all this. Hooray for freedom of expression. And thank you, guys!” (Likely a word of appreciation for the musicians of the orchestra, who have rather challenging parts as well).
The concerto’s finale is titled Adieu. Though Salonen wrote that “This is not a specific farewell to anything in particular,” there can be little doubt that the end of his 17 year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was on his mind as he wrote it. Salonen compared it to “the very basic process of nature, of something coming to an end and something new being born out of the old. Of course this music has a strong element of nostalgia, and some of the short outbursts of the full orchestra are almost violent, but I tried to illuminate the harmony from within.”
The movement is essentially structured as two large swells, which each crest with intense orchestral passages (here are the first and second passages). The movement then fades away in an extended coda. “When I had written the very last chord of the piece I felt confused,” Salonen wrote. “Why does the last chord—and only that—sound completely different from all other harmony of the piece? As if it belonged to a different composition. Now I believe I have the answer. That chord is a beginning of something new.”
Don’t miss Salonen’s Violin Concerto on Februaray 28 and March 2 and 3, 2019! Get tickets and more information at houstonsymphony.org.
