Esa-Pekka Salonen, LA Phil Creative Director

Salonen Conducts

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the LA Phil's Creative Director, leads six programs this season, from a Ravel concerto with Mitsuko Uchida to the ferocious finale of his own Rituals festival. This is Salonen's own case for why he's worth building a season around.

Mitsuko Uchida & Esa-Pekka Salonen

from $144

Pianist Mitsuko Uchida joins Salonen and the LA Phil for the first time in over twenty years, playing Ravel's jazz-inflected Piano Concerto in G with what Bachtrack calls a "lightness of touch and purity of tone." Salonen bookends the program with his own fanfare and Berlioz's opium-nightmare fever dream, Symphonie fantastique.

Salonen Conducts Rituals of the Everyday

from $42

Salonen teams up with director Yuval Sharon to turn the mundane, repetitive parts of daily life into a staged ritual, using projections and new music to make routine feel strange again. It's part concert, part theatre, part sociology experiment.

Salonen Leads Smith & Sibelius

from $107

Salonen leads Sibelius' swan-inspired Fifth Symphony, written to mark the composer's own 50th birthday, alongside the US premiere of Gabriella Smith's How to Be A Bird. The night opens with two solo flutes mimicking Arctic birds before a 1972 concerto that layers in actual recordings of birdsong.

One Morning Turns Into an Eternity with Esa-Pekka Salonen

from $107

Director Peter Sellars joins Salonen for an operatic journey through the life cycle, pairing Schoenberg's hallucinatory Erwartung with Mahler's "Farewell" from Das Lied von der Erde. Webern's five-minute miniature sits between them, doing, as Schoenberg once put it, the work of "a novel in a single gesture."

Requiem Esa-Pekka Salonen Conducts Mozart and Ligeti

from $148

Salonen pairs Mozart's Requiem, left unfinished at his death, with György Ligeti's, the same unsettling score Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Salonen led the LA Phil's first performance of the Ligeti back in 1998, and the New York Times said it felt like a "physical evocation of cold sweat."

The Rite of Spring with Salonen

from $148

Stravinsky's ballet score depicting a pagan sacrifice still sounds radical a century later, and Salonen conducts it alongside Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, played by three-time Grammy winner Hilary Hahn. Bachtrack singled out her "lush tone and affectionate shaping" as reason enough to hear her take on it.