Esa-Pekka Salonen Conducts Colburn Orchestra At The Soraya

World renowned composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct the Colburn Orchestra at The Soraya on Thursday, January 31 at 8 p.m. The program features Strauss tone poems the playful Til Eulenspiegel and grand Also sprach Zarathustra as well as Mozart's Clarinet Concerto performed by Cristina Mateo S ez, a Colburn Conservatory student and Jacques Lancelot International Clarinet Competition prizewinner.

Salonen joined the Colburn School faculty in September 2018 to lead a pre-professional conducting program, known as the Negaunee Conducting Program. Salonen will develop a course of study in the school's Conservatory of Music for a select group of aspiring young conductors. Known as Salonen Fellows, these students will develop their craft and nurture their talent through Salonen's mentorship. At both the Colburn School and with the Philharmonia Orchestra, where Salonen currently serves as Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor, the Salonen Fellows will gain significant real-world podium experience in Los Angeles and throughout the world.

Salonen was recently appointed Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, succeeding Michael Tilson Thomas, who concludes his 25-year tenure as Music Director in July 2020. Salonen will assume the position in September 2020.

The Colburn Orchestra, the flagship ensemble of the Colburn School's Conservatory of Music, regularly performs throughout Southern California with esteemed guest conductors and soloists. Upcoming Colburn Orchestra performances include an LA Phil Sounds About Town series concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, March 2 under the baton of guest conductor Xian Zhang, and a concert at the Ambassador Auditorium on Saturday, April 13 under the baton of Claur Peter Flor.

Tickets are $30 and available at thesoraya.org or by calling The Soraya ticket office at 818-677-3000.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's restless innovation drives him constantly to reposition classical music in the 21st century. He is known as both a composer and conductor and is currently the Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor for the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Conductor Laureate for both the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009. In 2020, he will become the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. He is the Artist in Association at the Finnish National Opera and Ballet, where he will conduct his first full Ring cycle in future seasons. This season, he joined the Colburn School faculty, where he will develop and direct the pre-professional Negaunee Conducting Program. Salonen co-founded the annual Baltic Sea festival, serving as Artistic Director from 2003 to 2018.

This season, thirteen of Salonen's works are programmed around the world, from playful early pieces to his melodically and rhythmically complex new works. Among them are Homunculus, for string quartet; Helix, at the Minnesota Orchestra and Oslo Philharmonic; and LA Variations at the LA Phil. He also conducts his own Pollux at the Helsinki Festival and Maggio Fiorentino, and his cello concerto on tour with the Philharmonia and at the Baltic Sea Festival, with Truls M rk as soloist. Last year the New York Philharmonic and the Barbican Centre shaped their programming around Salonen's music as part of his composer-in-residence in New York and a season-long Salonen focus in London.

2018-19 sees Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra on tour across Europe, the US, and Asia. Salonen will also direct a new Ivo van Hove production of Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in summer 2019. Recent years have seen Salonen experiment with groundbreaking ways to present music, with the first major virtual-reality production from a UK symphony orchestra; the award-winning RE-RITE and Universe of Sound installations, and the much-hailed iPad app, The Orchestra.

As the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years, Salonen is widely credited with revitalising the organization. He was instrumental in helping the orchestra to open Walt Disney Concert Hall; presided over countless premieres of contemporary work; began the Esa-Pekka Salonen Commissions Fund, and made the orchestra one of the best-attended and funded in the USA. In spring 2019 he brings a series that he created at the Philharmonia to the LA Phil, presenting programmes of Stravinsky's Myths, Rituals, and Faith.

Salonen has an extensive and varied recording career. An album of Henri Dutilleux's Correspondances, recorded with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in the presence of the composer, was released in 2013 by Deutsche Grammophon on the composer's 97th birthday. Also that year, Sony completed a project that began with Salonen and the LA Phil nearly 30 years before: a two-disc set of the orchestral works of Witold Lutos awski, released in what would have been the composer's 100th year. An album of five of his orchestral works is available on Sony. Salonen's most recent recordings include a disc of Stravinsky's Persephone, released by Pentatone Music, and a 61-disc box set of all Salonen's recordings for Sony. 2019 sees a much-anticipated release for Salonen's cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma

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