June 2, 2025
In Good Time
Esa-Pekka Salonen looks back on his time as SF Symphony Music Director
by Tim Greiving
by Tim Greiving
The pandemic shutdown of 2020 arrived at a moment of major transition for the San Francisco Symphony, silencing the stage as Michael Tilson Thomas prepared to take his final bows as Music Director and Esa-Pekka Salonen was about to assume the mantle. What was meant to be a celebratory handoff became a season of cancellations—no farewell concerts for Tilson Thomas, and no official debut for Salonen.
The past few years have brought their share of challenges, but as Salonen embarks on his final concerts in his final season as San Francisco’s music director, he is in a thoughtful, grateful mood—quick to praise this orchestra and to think fondly on his time here.
“I inherited a very good orchestra,” he says, via Zoom from Salzburg, where he is rehearsing Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra for the Salzburg Easter Festival.
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The past few years have brought their share of challenges, but as Salonen embarks on his final concerts in his final season as San Francisco’s music director, he is in a thoughtful, grateful mood—quick to praise this orchestra and to think fondly on his time here.
“I inherited a very good orchestra,” he says, via Zoom from Salzburg, where he is rehearsing Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra for the Salzburg Easter Festival.
Story continues below...
The Finnish double threat, 66, began his composing career in the early 1980s with a concerto for saxophone and orchestra. He made his conducting debut in 1979, with his hometown Finnish Radio Symphony, and was appointed music director of the Swedish Radio Symphony in 1985. A last-minute substitution for Tilson Thomas in London in 1983 attracted the attention of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who lured him to America in 1992—and for the next 17 years he significantly reshaped the Los Angeles orchestra. It was in the midst of his tenure in LA when he was invited to conduct the San Francisco Symphony for the first time.
He still vividly remembers that debut, on Thursday, April 1, 2004—a program that included the West Coast premiere of his piece Insomnia (composed in the wake of 9/11) and Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto. The audience that week met the visiting conductor with ecstatic standing ovations, and Salonen has “a very nice memory of the concert, and the way it went, and the way the orchestra played,” he says. “And of course it was very different, temperamentally, from the Los Angeles Philharmonic—which is not a surprise, obviously. So it took me a little bit of adjusting to get used to their way of reacting to things and so on. But this is normal. This happens always when a conductor goes to a new orchestra; it’s a mutual adjustment process, basically—reaction, impulse, reaction, feedback.”
When asked what exactly that unique temperament is, he muses: “It’s interesting how some of the DNA of an orchestra doesn’t change. The San Francisco Symphony then, already, I thought had this very pronounced lyrical quality to their playing, and a sort of natural, expressive, beautiful phrasing that they were intuitively producing, without any particular guidance from me on the box. This was like their default position. I thought: that’s interesting, because it’s still there, the expressive turn of the phrase. I think it’s been there for a long time, since the days of, I don't know, Pierre Monteux maybe…
“Sometimes,” he adds, “certain traditions are passed on from generation to generation, and we don’t quite know how it works. I’ve seen this so many times but I’m not sure what exactly the mechanism is, whether it’s some kind of osmosis, or whether it’s verbal—or whether it’s just like when fish swim in a perfect formation, so they synchronize their movements perfectly and we don’t quite know what the mechanism is, because we don’t know who the lead fish is. But it’s just like, one fish reads the three closest ones, and so on. It’s a slightly mysterious thing, but it’s there.”
Salonen spent much of his post-LA Phil years concentrating on writing his own music. But when, in 2018, this lyrical school of fish invited him to be their next music director, he called it a “no-brainer.”
Despite navigating the learning curve that faced this new maestro-orchestra relationship—an aborted inaugural season, tentative first concerts back with distanced audiences and smaller ensembles—he fell into an easy rhythm with the players. “That happened surprisingly and impressively quickly,” he says. He specifically thinks back on their performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony in October 2022, his first time conducting Mahler with his new orchestra. “MTT/SFS has been the official Mahler combo for decades, and before the first rehearsal I was imagining trying to kind of steer a train or something like that. But it wasn’t a train; it was totally open. ‘Okay, we know this piece very well, but what do you want to do with it?’ And I thought: all right—I have arrived. That was a significant moment.”
Salonen also inherited a diverse, omnivorous programming tradition from Tilson Thomas. “It felt very easy for me to take over from MTT in this way,” he says, “because his programming has been like a model for us younger conductors. But what he did, what he has always been doing, has been very open, very curious, very provocative at times, and sometimes the juxtapositions he has come up with have been absolutely brilliant. He did that a lot in San Francisco, so they were not particularly surprised by what I was doing, because it wasn’t that far off from their bread-and-butter.”
Salonen looks back at many highlights and cherished moments in these past five years. There were a number of premieres—piano concertos by both Nico Muhly and Magnus Lindberg, Strange Beasts by Emerging Black Composers Project winner Xavier Muzik, No Such Spring by Samuel Adams, and more. And while he doesn’t want to name any favorites, Salonen is happy to say “there have been a few premieres where we all felt that, okay, we have been the midwife to something that will have a long life. That’s the most satisfying thing. And obviously we cannot predict that, but when you collectively sense that, okay, this is important—that’s a really good feeling.”
New recordings during his time in San Francisco have included warhorses by Stravinsky, Berlioz, and Prokofiev, as well as spatial audio recordings of the music of Ligeti. The most poignant and personal for Salonen was the premiere recording of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater. “Peter Sellars and I premiered the opera in Paris in 2006, and worked closely with Kaija,” he says. “It was just a coincidence that Kaija passed away during the week of rehearsals for the concert performance of her opera, and her daughter was my assistant conductor. Here we were, having another crack on it—without her. And then to have a document made of that, I think that’s very important, personally.” The recording won a Grammy earlier this year for Best Opera Recording.
Salonen acknowledges the challenges facing the organization while emphasizing the special relationship he has cultivated with the musicians of the Orchestra during his time here. “I’ve been so impressed and touched by the quality and commitment on stage every night,” he says, “We cannot control what happens outside. But somehow, every concert has been highly enjoyable, and very intense in my experience.”
He already knows what he’ll be doing on the first morning after his final concert—which is Mahler’s Second Symphony, appropriately, on June 14. He’s in the midst of composing a concerto for Stefan Dohr, principal horn of the Berlin Philharmonic, and the premiere is in August. “Most likely,” he says, “I will get up early and go back to writing.”
Tim Greiving is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music, and the author of the forthcoming biography, John Williams: A Composer’s Life (Oxford University Press, September 2025). Find him at timgreiving.com.
He still vividly remembers that debut, on Thursday, April 1, 2004—a program that included the West Coast premiere of his piece Insomnia (composed in the wake of 9/11) and Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto. The audience that week met the visiting conductor with ecstatic standing ovations, and Salonen has “a very nice memory of the concert, and the way it went, and the way the orchestra played,” he says. “And of course it was very different, temperamentally, from the Los Angeles Philharmonic—which is not a surprise, obviously. So it took me a little bit of adjusting to get used to their way of reacting to things and so on. But this is normal. This happens always when a conductor goes to a new orchestra; it’s a mutual adjustment process, basically—reaction, impulse, reaction, feedback.”
When asked what exactly that unique temperament is, he muses: “It’s interesting how some of the DNA of an orchestra doesn’t change. The San Francisco Symphony then, already, I thought had this very pronounced lyrical quality to their playing, and a sort of natural, expressive, beautiful phrasing that they were intuitively producing, without any particular guidance from me on the box. This was like their default position. I thought: that’s interesting, because it’s still there, the expressive turn of the phrase. I think it’s been there for a long time, since the days of, I don't know, Pierre Monteux maybe…
“Sometimes,” he adds, “certain traditions are passed on from generation to generation, and we don’t quite know how it works. I’ve seen this so many times but I’m not sure what exactly the mechanism is, whether it’s some kind of osmosis, or whether it’s verbal—or whether it’s just like when fish swim in a perfect formation, so they synchronize their movements perfectly and we don’t quite know what the mechanism is, because we don’t know who the lead fish is. But it’s just like, one fish reads the three closest ones, and so on. It’s a slightly mysterious thing, but it’s there.”
Salonen spent much of his post-LA Phil years concentrating on writing his own music. But when, in 2018, this lyrical school of fish invited him to be their next music director, he called it a “no-brainer.”
Despite navigating the learning curve that faced this new maestro-orchestra relationship—an aborted inaugural season, tentative first concerts back with distanced audiences and smaller ensembles—he fell into an easy rhythm with the players. “That happened surprisingly and impressively quickly,” he says. He specifically thinks back on their performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony in October 2022, his first time conducting Mahler with his new orchestra. “MTT/SFS has been the official Mahler combo for decades, and before the first rehearsal I was imagining trying to kind of steer a train or something like that. But it wasn’t a train; it was totally open. ‘Okay, we know this piece very well, but what do you want to do with it?’ And I thought: all right—I have arrived. That was a significant moment.”
Salonen also inherited a diverse, omnivorous programming tradition from Tilson Thomas. “It felt very easy for me to take over from MTT in this way,” he says, “because his programming has been like a model for us younger conductors. But what he did, what he has always been doing, has been very open, very curious, very provocative at times, and sometimes the juxtapositions he has come up with have been absolutely brilliant. He did that a lot in San Francisco, so they were not particularly surprised by what I was doing, because it wasn’t that far off from their bread-and-butter.”
Salonen looks back at many highlights and cherished moments in these past five years. There were a number of premieres—piano concertos by both Nico Muhly and Magnus Lindberg, Strange Beasts by Emerging Black Composers Project winner Xavier Muzik, No Such Spring by Samuel Adams, and more. And while he doesn’t want to name any favorites, Salonen is happy to say “there have been a few premieres where we all felt that, okay, we have been the midwife to something that will have a long life. That’s the most satisfying thing. And obviously we cannot predict that, but when you collectively sense that, okay, this is important—that’s a really good feeling.”
New recordings during his time in San Francisco have included warhorses by Stravinsky, Berlioz, and Prokofiev, as well as spatial audio recordings of the music of Ligeti. The most poignant and personal for Salonen was the premiere recording of Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater. “Peter Sellars and I premiered the opera in Paris in 2006, and worked closely with Kaija,” he says. “It was just a coincidence that Kaija passed away during the week of rehearsals for the concert performance of her opera, and her daughter was my assistant conductor. Here we were, having another crack on it—without her. And then to have a document made of that, I think that’s very important, personally.” The recording won a Grammy earlier this year for Best Opera Recording.
Salonen acknowledges the challenges facing the organization while emphasizing the special relationship he has cultivated with the musicians of the Orchestra during his time here. “I’ve been so impressed and touched by the quality and commitment on stage every night,” he says, “We cannot control what happens outside. But somehow, every concert has been highly enjoyable, and very intense in my experience.”
He already knows what he’ll be doing on the first morning after his final concert—which is Mahler’s Second Symphony, appropriately, on June 14. He’s in the midst of composing a concerto for Stefan Dohr, principal horn of the Berlin Philharmonic, and the premiere is in August. “Most likely,” he says, “I will get up early and go back to writing.”
Tim Greiving is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music, and the author of the forthcoming biography, John Williams: A Composer’s Life (Oxford University Press, September 2025). Find him at timgreiving.com.
