Canceled SoundBox: Pekka Kuusisto & Jesper Nordin

Overview

Concert update: Due to the serious ill health of an immediate family member, Pekka Kuusisto has withdrawn from the February 25–26 SoundBox shows. The performances will be rescheduled for a future season to be announced.

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Violinist, conductor, and SF Symphony Collaborative Partner Pekka Kuusisto joins forces with composer Jesper Nordin to curate a SoundBox show traversing time and traditions. Kuusisto, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Ross Collins lead this epoch-spanning program.

Artists

Pekka Kuusisto

Curator and Violin

Jesper Nordin

Curator

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Conductor

Ross Jamie Collins

Conductor

San Francisco Symphony

Canceled SoundBox: Pekka Kuusisto & Jesper Nordin

Curator

Jesper Nordin is making a mark on the international music scene, with his music performed and broadcast over the globe. He has created a distinctive sound world that contains traces of traditional Swedish folk music, as well as rock and improvised music. His orchestral compositions have been performed by L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, BBC Scottish Symphony, Basel Symphony, Swedish Radio Symphony, Gothenburg Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Trondheim Symphony, and others. He has worked with conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kent Nagano, Daniel Harding, Pierre-André Valade, François-Xavier Roth, Eivind Gullberg Jensen, and Franck Ollu.

Apart from his orchestral music, Mr. Nordin is also regularly performed by major contemporary music ensembles. His music has been programmed by ensemble recherche, Quatuor Diotima, Ensemble l’Itinéraire, Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, ASKO ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and many others. He has received commissions from major ensembles and institutions in Europe, including IRCAM, the French Ministry of Culture, Mairie de Paris, as well as several art councils and radio stations in Europe and North America.

He has received many international awards, as well as Sweden’s foremost composition prize: the Royal Christ Johnson Award. His music has been played at several ISCM festivals, as well as Verbier Festival, ManiFeste, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, Biennale Musique en Scéne, Ultima, Tokyo Summer Music Festival, Montréal New Music, Archipel, and others.

After studies with Pär Lindgren, Bent Sørensen, and William Brunson at the Royal College in Stockholm, Mr. Nordin studied at IRCAM in Paris with Philippe Leroux and was later invited to serve as a visiting scholar at Stanford University for studies with Brian Ferneyhough and research at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

By working at different electroacoustic studios around the world, Mr. Nordin has made electronics a major part of his musical language both as a composer and as a performer with different ensembles and artists. He has also created the successful iOS apps Gestrument and ScaleGen, which are based on his own composition technique. They are used worldwide to create music in genres ranging from electronica and techno to improvisational jazz and contemporary classical music.

Feb 2023

Conductor

Esa-Pekka Salonen is known as both a composer and conductor. He is currently the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, where he works alongside eight Collaborative Partners from a variety of disciplines, ranging from composers to roboticists. He is the Conductor Laureate for the Philharmonia Orchestra, where he was Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor from 2008 until 2021, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He is currently in the midst of Multiverse Esa-Pekka Salonen, a two-season residency as both composer and conductor, at Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. As a member of the faculty of LA's Colburn School, he develops, leads, and directs the pre-professional Negaunee Conducting Program. Salonen co-founded— and from 2003 until 2018 served as the Artistic Director for—the annual Baltic Sea Festival, which invites celebrated artists to promote unity and ecological awareness among the countries around the Baltic Sea.

Since joining the San Francisco Symphony in 2020, Salonen’s tenure has been defined by an impulse to embrace the possibilities of the orchestra and expand the institution beyond the confines of the subscription season. In addition to an unprecedented leadership model in which he is joined by eight Collaborative Partners—whose diversity of expertise reflects the scope of experience he envisions as the future of classical music and its audience—Salonen has led a series of collaborations across disciplines and practices which unite the Symphony’s musicians, administrative staff, and hands-on facility workers into a singular engine dedicated to engaging classical music in novel ways.

Salonen also brings his longstanding affinity for emerging technologies to the Symphony. In his first two seasons, he has spearheaded a complete overhaul of Davies Hall’s complement of audio and visual recording equipment, launched the SFSymphony+ streaming platform with a series of signature projects including an AI-infused take on the music of Györgi Ligeti, and the Grammy-nominated Throughline, and reshaped the Symphony into a powerhouse of the unexpected, equally comfortable with live performance and expansive new media projects.

Salonen has an extensive and varied recording career, both as a conductor and composer. His recent recordings include Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, recorded with Lise Davidsen and the Philharmonia Orchestra; Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin and Dance Suite, also with the Philharmonia; Stravinsky’s Persephone, featuring Andrew Staples, Pauline Cheviller, and the Finnish National Opera, and a 2018 box set of his complete Sony recordings. His compositions appear on releases from Sony, Deutsche Grammophon, and Decca; his Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman), Violin Concerto (with Leila Jofesowicz), and Cello Concerto (with Yo-Yo Ma) all appear on recordings conducted by Salonen himself.

Salonen is the recipient of many major awards, including the UNESCO Rostrum Prize for his work Floof in 1992, and the Siena Prize, given by the Accademia Chigiana, in 1993; he is the first conductor to receive it. In 1995 he received the Royal Philharmonic Society's Opera Award and two years later, its Conductor Award. Salonen was awarded the Litteris et Artibus medal, one of Sweden's highest honors, by the King of Sweden in 1996. In 1998 the French government awarded him the rank of Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In addition to receiving both the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland and the Helsinki Medal, he was named Commander, First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland by the President of Finland. Musical America named him its Musician of the Year in 2006, and he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. His Violin Concerto won the 2012 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. He was the recipient of the 2014 Nemmers Composition Prize, which included a residency at the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University and performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2020, he was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by the Queen of England. To date, he has received seven honorary doctorates in four different countries.