He sat down for his first ‘exclusive’ interview since quitting the San Francisco Symphony and made no reference to its board and CEO with whom he has terminally fallen out.
He said nothing about his frustrations, his future plans, his regrets.
There’s an art in that and he has perfected it.
Sample quote of E-P Salonen saying nothing:
There are giant trees that are pillars of what we do, that have been able to survive all the storms and earthquakes and all that. There are the younger trees, budding trees. And there are things that are not trees but all this other kind of vegetation. It’s constantly changing and growing. But it’s still a forest. When you go to a beautiful forest, it makes you a better human being. We all know this. The smells and the sounds, besides just giving you pleasure, somehow make you connect with something that we sometimes forget we have. The best-case scenario when people come to concerts is they connect with something they feel is bigger than any one individual.
The best music connects us with things and people who have existed before us and also people and ideas that don’t exist yet. Because the history of this kind of art music is one of continuity. It’s an unbroken chain of works being created on the shoulders of other previous works. So what we’re witnessing and experiencing when we go through a season is that some very old ideas that keep coming back in different ways and forms, and new material built upon those old ideas takes them further, and finally comes to our time and music that is still being written. This is what I meant by the forest analogy. I see myself more as a gardener than a bookkeeper.
Chauncy Gardner?
The post Esa-Pekka Salonen: So good at saying nothing appeared first on Slippedisc.
