The Minimalist Jukebox festival, which happened in the spring of 2006, was originally supposed to be a relatively conventional series of programs linking minimalist composers and earlier classical repertory—say, Steve Reich and Bach. But this seemed too boring for Disney Hall. What emerged instead was a two-week festival that ranged from classic minimalist pieces by Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass to postminimal-ist works such as Michael Gordon’s
Decasia
and Glenn Branca’s
Hallucination City
, a symphony for a hundred electric guitars. The series kicked off with an all-night show by the Orb, a British group that plays ambient
house music. Subscribers fled en masse, exchanging their tickets for other series, but the empty seats were filled by new, much younger listeners. The festival came close to breaking even, despite the fact that some ticket prices had been reduced to accommodate a less genteel crowd.
Perhaps Borda’s boldest notion is to give visiting composers such as Adams and Thomas Ades the same royal treatment that is extended to the likes of Yo-Yo Ma and Joshua Bell; Borda talks about “hero composers.” A 2007 performance of Adams’s
Naive and Sentimental
Music in the orchestra’s Casual Fridays series—a shortened program in which the players skip formal dress and mingle with listeners afterward-drew a nearly full house. Borda’s big-guns approach has invigorated the orchestra’s long-running new-music series, called Green Umbrella, which Fleischmann established in 1982. In the early days, it drew modest audiences, but in recent years attendance has risen to the point where as many as sixteen hundred people show up for a concert that in other cities might draw thirty or forty. In 2006, the Australian composer Brett Dean walked onstage for a Green Umbrella concert and did a double take, saying that it was the largest new-music audience he’d ever seen.
One area in which the orchestra has done less well is in promoting younger composers. Speaking at an education conference in New York, Salonen said, “Institutions tend to play it safe. They are less willing to commission a large work by a young composer. They don’t want to take the risk. It’s the same old names that keep being circulated all the time.” This is precisely what any number of composers who are not Adams, Ades, Stucky, or a half-dozen others might say about the Philharmonic itself. As the “hero composers” concept takes hold, the orchestra might want to challenge its own philosophy by taking chances on twenty-six-year-old composers, as it has on twenty-six-year-old conductors.
The Philharmonic is trying to solve the ultimate mystery of the orchestra business, which is how to attract new listeners without alienating established ones. The core audience will always be longtime lovers of classical music who mainly want to hear symphonies of Beethoven and concertos of Rachmaninov. Then there are Salonen’s “people who basically use their brains more”—who ought to be at classical concerts but usually aren’t. To serve both audiences, the orchestra becomes, in effect, two institutions folded into one: a museum of masterpieces and a gallery of new work. A number of music directors in other cities—notably,
David Robertson in St. Louis, Robert Spano in Atlanta, Marin Alsop in Baltimore, Osmo Vänskä in Minneapolis, and, since 2009, Alan Gilbert in New York—are moving in the same direction. Suddenly, it no longer makes sense to generalize about the hidebound attitude of the American orchestra.
As for the players themselves, their greatest resource is flexibility. The great orchestras of Cleveland and Chicago may possess a more flawlessly polished sound, but no American ensemble matches the L.A. Philharmonic in its ability to assimilate a wide range of music on a moment’s notice. Ades, who first conducted his music in L.A. in 2006 and has become a regular visitor, told me, “They always seem to begin by finding exactly the right playing style for each piece of music-the kind of sound, the kind of phrasing, breathing, attacks, colors, the indefinable whole. That shouldn’t be unusual, but it is.” Adams calls the Philharmonic “the most
Amurrican
of orchestras. They don’t hold back and they don’t put on airs. If you met them in twos or threes, you’d have no idea they were playing in an orchestra, that they were classical-music people.”
One day, I followed Ben Hong, the assistant principal cellist, as he went about his daily duties. A shaggy-haired thirty-eight-year-old who commutes on a motorcycle, he had been playing in the Philharmonic since he was twenty-four. He arrived at the hall at 9:00 a.m. to coach two students in a studio in the building. One of them was working on Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and Hong, after working through issues of bowing and phrasing, tried to get his student to think about the piece in terms of “lost innocence” and the legacy of war.
Just before eleven, Hong reported to the main floor of Disney to play a matinee concert. The program consisted of Brahms’s First and Third Symphonies, under the direction of Christoph von Dohnanyi, who was visiting for two weeks. “We’ll sell some tickets,” Borda said of this concert in advance. “Plus, it will be good for the orchestra. Christoph will pick everything to pieces, rehearse in great detail, go back to basics.”
After the concert, Hong had lunch with a few younger players: Eric Overholt, who had been playing French horn in the orchestra for only a few months; Ariana Ghez, the principal oboist, who had also started that season; and Joana Carneiro, the assistant conductor. They talked about
the audition process (“It’s pretty brutal, probably the most difficult thing you have to do as a musician,” Hong said), the limits of a conservatory education (Ghez studied English at Columbia alongside music at Juilliard), and the intellectual pleasure of playing new works. Some orchestra veterans had never relished Salonen’s favored diet of twentieth-century and contemporary fare, but several of the younger musicians identified it as one of the main attractions of the job. Ghez noted that older listeners no longer run for the exits when a little Ligeti appears on one of the regular programs. Instead, she said, they have been trained to say things like “I guess you have to take it like a Jackson Pollock.”
Hong was thinking more deeply about the gaps in his conservatory training, and wondering what he might learn from other kinds of music-making. In particular, he had taken an interest in improvisation. After lunch, he drove up some twisting roads in the Laurel Canyon area to the home of Lili Haydn, a session violinist, singer-songwriter, and former child actress, who has been giving him guidance on how to improvise in a semi-jazz, semi-Indian style. This activity falls far outside his usual work with the orchestra, although it fits into the expanded mission of Salonen’s Philharmonic, improvisation having a role in much avant-garde music after the Second World War and in quite a bit of alternative-minded contemporary work.
Hong joined Haydn in her studio, which was outfitted with wall hangings and antique lamps. There was a faint smell of incense. First, they worked on a track that will appear on Haydn’s forthcoming album. She sang, “We all saw the water sweep the streets with the force that carried Noah.” Hong played a doleful, arpeggiated accompaniment. Then the two improvised for twenty minutes or so over an Indian tamboura drone. Hong seemed hesitant at first, locking himself into a repeating figure or falling into rapid up-and-down scales that seemed exterior to the mood.
“Find the magic in the intervals,” Haydn told him. She asked him to take hold of a figure of two or three notes, bend it this way and that against the regular rhythm, and then savor the effect of adding one more note. Hong promptly took off on a ruminative minor-key flight that sounded a little like the cello lines in Sibelius’s
Swan of Tuonela
and, for a minute or two, became lost in music of his own invention.
He said at one point, “After a few sessions, I’m hearing things in a different way. I am feeling the nuances of each note in a more intense way. It’s like when I was growing up—they’d say that you must chew each
mouthful of rice seventy-two times to really taste the sweetness of the rice. There’s something to that. Sometimes in classical music that’s lost. This has taught me to be more appreciative of each note.”
Hong deftly related all this back to the Brahms he had played that morning. He launched into a free rendition of the grand chromatic line that soars through the orchestra at the beginning of the First Symphony, giving each note a slightly different color and weight. He stopped at the topmost B flat, letting the note float out over the canyon.
To spend time with a musician like Hong is to realize that the effect of a conductor on an orchestra is easily overstated: the L.A. Philharmonic is the sum of a hundred distinct personalities. Salonen knows this as well as anyone; as a youth, he was skeptical of his future profession. “I had no great desires of becoming a conductor,” he says. “In fact, I thought conductors were disgusting. I very much disliked this image of a conductor like Herbert von Karajan, riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, conducting
Ein Heldenleben.
I thought that was really bad. I still do, actually. I thought that conductors get so much attention for almost no reason and the really important guy, i.e., the composer, is the worst-paid one and the one who always stays in the worst hotel and is kicked on the head by everybody else, and I thought that was rotten. I still do, actually.”
For several years, Salonen had been making semipublic noises about leaving the Philharmonic. He had set himself various goals—to move into the new hall, to find an artistic vision befitting Gehry’s space, to elevate the orchestra’s playing, to cultivate its financial health. “Bit by bit,” he told me, “all this started to become reality.” He had thought of stepping away after the opening of Disney Hall, but he couldn’t yet give up the heady experience of conducting in that space. “I thought, This is too much fun. It felt like the harvesting time. There also was a new level to the relationship with the orchestra. I quite often felt as though they were reading my mind—they would do something just as I was vaguely thinking of it. A lot of warmth and good feeling on both sides.” Still, even when he was on a break, he sensed the obligations of the job pressing on him.
In the spring of 2006, while Minimalist Jukebox was going on in L.A., Salonen was in Paris, leading the world premiere of the opera
Adriana Mater
, by his old schoolmate Kaija Saariaho. In Paris, Salonen started making sketches for a Piano Concerto, which the New York Philharmonic
had commissioned from him. Work proceeded in fits and starts over the summer and through the fall, and the score was finally finished over Christmas. As he reluctantly stole away from his family into his studio, he felt more acutely the need to give up the directorship of the orchestra.
The concerto was written for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, one of Salonen’s closest friends and a leading interpreter of Rachmaninov. Salonen was determined to confront the legacy of the virtuoso Romantic concerto, and he indulged in cascading double octaves, wide-spanning chords, and, at the end of the second movement, a certifiable Big Tune. At the same time, the musical language of the piece feels very up to date; there are bopping rhythms, trickily shifting beats, alarms and noises, malfunctioning machine patterns, and a fabulously eerie section that Salonen characterizes as “Synthetic Folk Music with Artificial Birds.” In a lively program note, he connects that last episode to a “post-biological culture where the cybernetic systems suddenly develop an existential need of folklore.” In all, it’s a plausible reinvention of the Romantic concerto, and Salonen’s most assured work to date.
Bronfman had to learn the solo part in a few weeks, and initially he complained about its punishing difficulty. (Subconscious feelings of guilt may have produced a cryptic dream that the composer reported having one night, in which Bronfman was falsely accused of the murder of the actress Helen Mirren.) Salonen conducted the premiere himself, appearing with the New York Philharmonic for the first time since 1986. The performance took place on February 1, 2007, and the audience responded with more wholehearted enthusiasm than is normal for a New York subscription-series premiere. An elderly couple was observed holding hands during the slow movement.
Afterward, Salonen was more confident about his choice to step down. “I felt that this is the way to go,” he later told me. “Now I’m ready for the next project.” He had long talked of writing an opera. He was also planning a piece for chorus and orchestra, possibly based on Joseph Brodsky’s final poetry collection,
So Forth.
Some lines from the Brodsky poem “New Life” seemed relevant: “Ultimately, one’s unbound / curiosity about these empty zones, / about these objectless vistas, / is what art seems to be all about.”
The Philharmonic players were keenly interested in the question of who might come next. “We’re cresting a wave—it’s just amazing,” Meredith Snow, a member of the viola section, told me in January 2007. “The transition from Salonen scares us. But it feels like our management is really looking out for that.”
I asked Snow and David Allen Moore, a double-bass player, which conductors had made a good impression. The list of names was relatively short. “There’s such a vacuum,” Snow said. “We’re so desperate for the quality of honesty. At least in this orchestra, there’s no baggage of people prejudging conductors. It’s, like, ‘Please be good.’ We’ll participate if you show us what you want, emotionally and musically.”
Dudamel’s name was the first one they mentioned. “He was great,” Snow said. “He has it all. This orchestra was on fire with him.”