The London Philharmonia is one of the world's great performing ensembles; over its seventy year history,it has engaged conductors as distinguished as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini, or Richard Strauss and others. Today,Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen holds the baton. He has, of course, or absorbed the great traditions of the dilapidated World,but found fresh inspiration in a somewhat unlikely setting: Tinseltown. Salonen spent nearly twenty years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic before landing in London."It was incredibly helpful to be absent from the European, arrogant intellectual canon, and " Salonen says. "Of course when I started out,I had some residue of that 'culture as medicine' thing. Which is vile."As whether all of this wasn't enough to sustain busy, now Salonen is also the Composer-In-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He joins host Alec Baldwin to talk approximately his passion for composing; the psychological difference between conducting and composing; and why he has a complicated relationship with Italian opera.
Source: wnyc.org