CLICK HERE if you are having trouble viewing these photos on a mobile device
Speculation has run rampant since the San Francisco Symphony’s long-time music director Michael Tilson Thomas announced he would be stepping down after a 25-year career at Davies Symphony Hall. Music critics compiled short lists and madly theorized about who the successor might be.
But Wednesday’s announcement that Esa-Pekka Salonen — the acclaimed Finnish composer and conductor — would become San Francisco’s next music director took the music world by surprise. No one knew the former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and current principal conductor and artistic advisor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra was even looking for a new job. NPR tweeted about “the surprise move,” and the New York Times waxed effusive. The consensus: The Bay Area really scored.
Salonen’s official tenure begins September 2020. And in the most intriguing development, he’ll be bringing what the symphony describes as a new artistic leadership model: a diverse eight-member creative brain trust that includes a robotics scientist, a jazz great and the Academy Award-nominated composer for “Moonlight,” as well as new-music advocates and musicians.
Salonen will be the 12th music director in the San Francisco Symphony’s 107-year history, taking over for Thomas, who will conclude his 25-year term as music director in July 2020.
An acclaimed composer as well as a world-renowned conductor, Salonen is a committed advocate for new music, diverse musical voices and bold experimentation in a brave new world.
“I think it’s pretty clear to everyone that the culture that surrounds us has gone through a profound change in the last 20 years,” Salonen said. “We’ve witnessed a change of people’s cultural habits, the blessing and the curse of the internet. A classical music organization should be leading the way through all this, rather than reacting to it, using all the possibilities that new technology offers without losing the integrity of the organization, which is, of course, to perform orchestral music — live performances for live people.”
According to San Francisco Symphony president Sakurako Fisher and chief executive officer Mark C. Hanson, Salonen will begin taking on his new role here immediately. He’ll lead the San Francisco Symphony in concerts January 18-20, 2019, in a program featuring the orchestra’s premiere of “Metacosmos” by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and Sibelius’ “Four Legends from the Kalevala” complete the program.
He’ll return as music director designate in the 2019-20 season to conduct at least two weeks of programs and take the reins officially that fall with an initial five-year contract. Expect to see him on the podium for six weeks of subscription concerts that year as well as on the orchestra’s tour of Asia. Beginning in 2021-22, Salonen will conduct 12 to 14 weeks each season. (His tenure with the London Philharmonia Orchestra concludes in 2021.)
Although Salonen said he hadn’t been looking for another music directorship, he found the San Francisco Symphony’s offer impossible to resist.
“From the very first approach, the San Francisco Symphony leaders and musicians and I were buzzing with possibilities,” he said. “The ‘what-ifs’ of the orchestra world were suddenly on the table in a real way. Here is a top symphony orchestra in the place in America where things start, where the ways things have always been done are interrogated, and where problems are first identified and then solved. In San Francisco itself, and in the San Francisco Symphony, I see both the big ideas being thought and the actual work being done, and that, to me, is irresistible.”
Tilson Thomas, who made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 1974 at age 29 and was appointed music director in 1995, said that Salonen was an ideal choice.
“I am so happy that my friend and colleague is coming to San Francisco,” said Tilson Thomas. “Our lives have been personally and musically intertwined for years, and we share many musical values. It will be a joy to collaborate with him on this bright future for the whole Symphony family.”
Salonen’s artistic leadership team includes artists and thinkers, from a Santa Clara University and Stanford-educated artificial intelligence expert to the Academy Award-nominated composer for the film “Moonlight.”
“I don’t feel that I have ever achieved anything alone. It’s always a result of dedicated people working together,” Salonen said. “When I decided to come here, I thought I needed a team of younger people that were not necessarily from the center of the classical music experience but understand the art form, to give me help not only in curating programs and content but in connecting the community in new ways.”
The diverse team includes pianist and Oscar-nominated composer Nicholas Britell; soprano, curator and social justice activist Julia Bullock; flutist and new music-advocate Claire Chase; composer, new music curator and rock musician Bryce Dessner; violinist and electronic composer Pekka Kuusisto; stage, screen and new-music composer Nico Muhly; artificial intelligence entrepreneur and roboticist Carol Reiley; and jazz bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding.
