MUSIC : Start Spreading the New

Esa-Pekka Salonen has been getting a lot of attention lately, and not just because he looks like Michael J. Fox. At 34, he has become music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the 10th in the orchestra’s 73-year history. He will lead the orchestra in Costa Mesa on Saturday in a program sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. It will be the first time he has conducted at the Performing Arts Center (but it will not be his O.C. debut: As a guest conductor, he led the L.A. Phil at Santa Ana High School in 1985).

Salonen began studying horn and composition at the Sibelius Academy in his native Helsinki when he was 15, shifted his attention to conducting and made his conducting debut with the Finnish Radio Symphony at age 21.

He was catapulted to fame three years later when he filled in for an ailing Michael Tilson Thomas on three-day’s notice to lead the London Philharmonia in Mahler’s huge, sprawling Symphony No. 3 (Salonen chose the Mahler Third for his first concerts as music director in Los Angeles last week).

Considered a partisan of new music, he will open his program in Costa Mesa with Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra (composed in 1928 but still considered “new” by many conservative audiences). The concert also will include Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony.

Who: Esa-Pekka Salonen, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in works by Schumann, Liszt and Schoenberg (Emanuel Ax will be the piano soloist).

When: Saturday, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m.

Where: The Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

Whereabouts: One block east of the South Coast Plaza mall.

Wherewithal: $15 to $45.

Where to call: (714) 553-2422.