Let’s Pretend (for a Year)

We are about to lose the conducting of Esa-Pekka Salonen for a year. But before the Los Angeles Philharmonic music director drops his baton for a long-planned sabbatical, he makes one last trip to the podium to remind us why he wanted the time off in the first place--to compose. Tonight he leads the orchestra in an all-Salonen program at Royce Hall.

“This is really a practical thing,” Salonen says of the concert, centerpiece of the Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella contemporary music series this season. “Sony is going to make a CD of my music for orchestra. We would have to rehearse it anyway, so it makes sense to give a concert also. That’s the long and short of it.

“Another part of it, however, is that I have plans to enhance the Green Umbrella series to include the large orchestra sometimes. It would be good for people’s perception to let them know that new music is not just a couple of guys sawing away.”

The program gathers “Gambit,” the song cycle “Five Images After Sappho,” ’Giro” and “LA Variations.”

“These four are my latest orchestral pieces. The odd man out is ‘Giro,’ which I wrote almost 20 years ago, but rewrote in 1997. It was very interesting to look again into something that I can partly identify with and partly not--20 years is half my life.”

“Giro” was originally composed in what he calls “strictly post-serial” style--”serial” refers to the use of relationships, or series, of rhythms or pitches or other musical elements as an organizing tool for a composition, a strategy that has roots in the 20th century’s seminal 12-tone experiments.

Now, “Giro” has been recast harmonically with the aid of a computer program that analyzes chords to find an overtone series that includes all the notes. Overtones are the harmonics or partial tones created above the fundamental pitch of almost every natural sound, from which the scales and hierarchical organization of Western tonal music can be derived.

Via the computer, Salonen discovered that the very dissonant chords he had originally used in “Giro” were essentially interpretations of three major keys.

“It seems very clear that whatever has happened in this century musically--we still have not gone very far from tonal centers,” Salonen says. “Whether a reaction against it or an attempt to develop it further, whatever we do is a reflection on the great tradition of tonal music, like satellites circling around the central sun of the overtone series.

“We can change everything around us, but we cannot change the way we hear. Your own skull produces an overtone series that your ears hear all the time. I’m not saying we should [be] writing lullabies in C major, but I don’t think atonality is viable. Even music that thinks of itself as atonal is not truly atonal because of the way we hear.

“In any case, the whole atonal versus tonal dialectic is dated and not interesting. What should be important is the expression itself, not which camp it is in. We’re in an era of synthesis, and that’s the fun of it, that’s the whole point. Performance is not about scholarly truth, or right and wrong, or proving something, it is about expressing something.”

As you might be able to tell, Salonen’s music is anything but simplistic. It is much admired for its color, verve and originality, respect for the overtone series notwithstanding. Never having conducted an entire evening of his own work, he’s not sure just how this set of pieces will work in concert.

“I have no idea, absolutely none at all,” he says emphatically. “It is a demanding situation for any composer. For an audience, if it hears one new 15-minute piece, it takes 13 minutes to begin to get it, so you’re left with two minutes of understanding. On a program devoted to one composer, you have time to get used to the grammar and to understand the content. At least, this is what I hope.”

Salonen has been composing most of his musical life. With fame as a conductor has come closer scrutiny of his own music, and now many of his earliest teenage efforts have been recorded, in multiple performances. And as his compositions have gained their own critical mass--this program represents about half of his orchestral output--commissions have come rolling in, hence the sabbatical.

“The whole point for me is just to see what it would be like to be a full-time composer. I have so many commissions now, theoretically I could just compose, so I am going to be pretending to be one for a year.”

At the top of the composer’s to-do list is an opera for the Aix-en-Provence Festival. He is developing his own text, loosely based on Danish writer Peter Hoeg’s novel “The Woman and the Ape.”

“Every good opera has a sort of impossible love story,” Salonen says, “with a mythic or taboo element. There are not many taboos now. After ‘Lolita,’ an interspecies relationship seems like the last taboo. I have had to postpone the premiere, however, because the libretto is lagging behind. It now will be 2003 or ’04.”

Other major projects include a piano concerto for Yefim Bronfman commissioned by Suntory Hall in Tokyo and an orchestral piece for the annual London Proms concert, both due to be performed in 2001. Salonen reports that he is also planning to study Baroque performance practice, chamber music of Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann, and practice the piano a bit (he was originally a French horn player).

He will not be doing any of this from a point of remote isolation, at least at first. There is this recording to complete, for one thing, and it will not be finished until June, when Dawn Upshaw can join them for the “Sappho” cycle. The piece was originally intended for her, but illness forced her out of the premiere last summer at the Ojai Festival. Laura Claycomb, who has worked often with Salonen, replaced her then and will sing the performance tonight, but it is Upshaw Sony wants on the recording, which is due this autumn.

“I have decided to spend the first months of my sabbatical here [Los Angeles], partly because I like it here, but also because Deborah Borda [new managing director of the Philharmonic] is going to be moving in,” Salonen says. “I’ll be planning, auditioning--basically doing everything I usually do except conducting concerts.

“What is getting urgent is the first season in Disney Hall. There will be visiting orchestras, an ongoing festival--what sort of statement do we want to make? That’s the first big issue we’re going to tackle with Deborah.

“Disney Hall is steaming ahead. There is still an endless agenda of details, but that’s all worthwhile now that it’s actually happening.”

Salonen’s enthusiasm for his continuing work as Philharmonic music director is heartening, considering his avowed interest in spending a year exploring what it would be like to abandon it for composition. But much as he has wanted more time to compose, he is beginning to suspect that while composing, he will want more opportunities to conduct.

“I already feel withdrawal symptoms,” he acknowledges. “I was in my study the other day, just looking at scores randomly. I pulled out Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony and thought what a great piece that would be to do, and I had a dream that night about conducting it. But when I woke up, I realized I will not be conducting anything soon. I told my wife about it and she said, ‘We’re not going to have this for a year now, are we, you complaining about not conducting?’

“It is a change of pace. Composing is very lonely and very slow. Feedback is delayed. Performing, you just go out and do it. You’re working with people, feel a physical excitement, and you get immediate feedback. I don’t find it difficult to switch between inventing my own music and performing somebody else’s music--it’s the pace that is the problem for me.”

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* All-Salonen concert, Los Angeles Philharmonic, tonight at 8, Royce Hall, UCLA, $10-$45, (323) 850-2000. Salonen will give a preconcert talk in Room 190 in Royce Hall, with Steven Stucky; free to concert ticket holders.

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“Composing is very lonely and very slow. Feedback is delayed. Performing, you just go out and do it. You’re working with people, feel a physical excitement, and you get immediate feedback.”