Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Esa-Pekka Salonen

At Carnegie Hall the MET orchestra proves that, temporarily rudderless, it's still a top ensemble

Salonen has an obvious vision on how to conduct Mahler, relentelsly driving the orchestra in the direction he wants.

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts an emotionally exhausting evening of Mahler and Bartók

A typically adventurous programme "curated" by Esa-Pekka Salonen paired Boulez with Debussy. 

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the US première of Tansy Davies' Forest, a work intended to evoke a Romantic sensation of mystery and nature.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto received a successful world première with Yo-Yo Ma and the Chicago Symphony, the composer conducting, richly complemented by works of Adams and Stravinsky.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s colorful program included the first Chicago performance of John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 with dedicatee Leila Josefowicz, along with works of Debussy and Stravinsky.

Clear playing from Pierre-Laurent Aimard in the Emperor Concerto and a sense of the dramatic in Also sprach Zarathustra brought life to old warhorses, while a new concerto from Tansy Davies made waves.

Clarinetist Kari Kriikku sauntered through the aisles of both the orchestra and audience, spinning around in two complete 360s and surely dousing the flabbergasted listeners in the floor seating with saliva.

Listening to Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra brought back memories of his halcyon days with the Los Angeles Philharmonic when he summoned up Sibelius with a golden magician's wand, and Beethoven with a lapidarian's curiosity. 

Searing performances from a mixed cast, superb choir and orchestra; all brilliantly conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.

As Esa-Pekka Salonen resumes his Stravinsky series, he turns his attention to three underperformed works based on key figures of Greek mythology: Orpheus, Apollo and Persephone.

Esa-Pekka Salonen and Yuja Wang at the Baltic Sea Festival.

Fine Dutilleux celebration sandwiched between brilliant Schoenberg and patchy Mahler.

A wedding feast, a man in drag and an outwitted fox were unlikely accomplices in the second concert in the Philharmonia's series Stravinsky: Myths and Rituals. 

In the first concert of their exciting series Stravinsky: Myth and Ritual celebrating the varied musical inspirations of this most iconic figure of 20th-century composers, the focus was on Rituals. 

The late director Patrice Chereau's last work, Elektra, was brilliantly realized at the Met, with special credit to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and soprano Nina Stemme.

The combination of Esa-Pekka Salonen and the New York Philharmonic, in the first of three evenings devoted solely to Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie proved riveting and exhilarating. 

As part of the New York Philharmonic’s CONTACT new music series at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Esa-Pekka Salonen drew connections among Olivier Messiaen, two of his students (Pierre Boulez and George Benjamin) and one outlier (Oliver Knussen).

An eclectic program under Esa-Pekka Salonen's baton, highlighted by Lutosławski’s watershed Third Symphony and a Shostakovich concerto with Yo-Yo Ma.

Great opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande as part of the City of Light, a retrospective that examines works seen in Paris during the first half of the 20th century. 

Powerful Romeo and Juliet and triumphant Scriabin from the Philharmonia and Salonen, with moments of excitement in Prokofiev from Lang Lang.

Juha Hemánus' terrific semi-staging of Peer Gynt, using Grieg's incidental music, is the impresses at the Royal Festival Hall. 

A daring, fascinating pairing of two modern operas by Krzysztof Warlikowski in Paris. 

Difficult to imagine anyone finding fault with Arabella Steinbacher's Brahms concerto – or finding a similar consensus about Salonen's Sibelius Five.

Fervent flag-waving is usually reserved for the Last Night of the Proms, so what was going on in this Philharmonia concert? The Arena was awash with a sea of red flags, the chorus – and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen – were decked out in T-shirts bearing portraits of Lenin or Stalin.

The Philharmonia Orchestra's Paris: City of Light 1900–1950 reaches its climax, where Debussy and Messiaen combine for a radiant, dazzling programme. Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard crowns an emotionally intense Turangalîla-symphonie.

This final concert of a three-week festival of French music featured works by Debussy, Ravel, and Messiaen. In a clever bit of programming, the number of performers on stage grew from one flautist on the first piece to a symphony of over 100 for the last.

Whimsical program of French symphonic and operatic works opens the CSO's "French Reveries and Passions" festival.

City of Light: Paris 1900-1950 was the stimulus behind an evening of impressive performances of inspirational music by Ravel and Stravinsky.

The Philharmonia's City of Light season goes from strength to strength with an outstanding performance of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges and Dutilleux's Correspondances.

With the Philharmonia on top form, a superlative cast and clever touches of direction, this was a truly stunning concert performance of Debussy's only opera.

Esa-Pekka Salonen infused his rendition of L'Oiseau de feu with air rather than fire. I’ve come to expect passion and urgency from performances of the complete ballet, but his splintering silences and startling dynamic shifts lent a unique tone to the work.

Esa-Pekka Salonen opened the Philharmonia season with a taut, driven Berlioz Requiem, epic, if somewhat constrained by the scale of the Festival Hall.

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Philharmonia in a fine account of Mahler's mighty “Symphony of a Thousand”, culminating in a dramatic realisation of Faust's redemption.

A programme of works by Kaija Saariaho and Jean Sibelius promised a blast of Nordic ice down the back of the neck, but the performances under fellow Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen raised the temperature considerably higher than anticipated.

Les occasions d’entendre les Gurrelieder d’Arnold Schönberg ne sont pas si fréquentes.

My big night out this week was spent at the New York Philharmonic’s Tuesday evening concert, surely the case for most other 23-year-olds. (I kid, and yet over the past couple of years I have noticed a decided increase in young faces at Avery Fisher Hall.) I had intended to sit anonymously in the audience and get swept into the music like a leaf in the autumn wind.

If it was a little strange that Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 30th anniversary with the Philharmonia was celebrated with a traditional, unadventurous Sunday matinée programme which did little to challenge its audience, at least the quality of the performance made it clear why this conductor is so well loved and respected.

In one of several (pretty outrageous) notes to conductors in the score of his Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz states that “the average listener has no imagination” and, as a result of this, the sixth movement of the work should be cut in 99 per cent of performances.

A night drawn mostly from a gentler range of sounds, some more familiar, some stranger. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra London brought classics from Debussy and Ravel to the Philharmonie in Berlin, and paired them with two works by Lutosławski: the intricate and incredible Third Symphony, and Les espaces du sommeil, something between a monodrama and a song accompanied by orchestr

The most memorable thing about this concert for me was the sheer glory of the Philharmonia’s playing. Whether it was in the winning, sprightly Mozart overture, or in all the glinting colours of Peter Eötvös’ new work, or in the full and rich late-Romantic orchestral tones of the Bruckner, these musicians, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, were magnificent.

The centenary of the première of The Rite of Spring – now that is something to celebrate. The Philharmonia, led by chief conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, did it in style, with Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy (who of course famously performed the Rite with Stravinsky on the piano), Amériques by Edgard Varèse (who was present at the première, and very much influenced by

Among the brilliant programming of The Rest is Noise festival in London, there was one concert this year that stood above all the others for me: the European première of Shostakovich’s opera prologue Orango. First discovered in an archive in 2004 by scholar Olga Digonskaya, Orango was never finished by Shostakovich, and indeed only a piano score remained.

In An Attitude to French Culture the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski remarked “I am aware that of the two traditions that initiated 20th-century music, that is, Schoenberg and Debussy, it is the latter that I feel prevails in my own compositional work”.

Continuing Woven Words, the Lutosławski festival, the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen presented us with another evening of impressive music and impressive programming. Like featuring Ravael’s Daphnis et Chloé in the Lutosławski concert on 30 January, opening this evening with Debussy’s La mer proved an excellent decision.La mer is a piece that heavily relies on interpretation.

This past Thursday and Friday, Yo-Yo Ma (the CSO’s Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant), Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra tackled the immensely challenging Lutosławski Cello Concerto.

When one hears an Esa-Pekka Salonen interpretation one expects no less than a keen and original approach tempered by an incredible ear for accuracy. This no doubt comes from his prolific work as a composer, work which has of late dominated his professional life.The sound he pulled from the cello section to open tonight’s concert of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was breathtakingly withdrawn.

The Southbank Centre’s centenary celebration of Witold Lutosławski, titled Woven Words, can easily be overshadowed by the excitement of this year’s The Rest is Noise festival.

The haze of the surreal, somnambulistic nightscape of Witold Lutosławski’s Les espaces du sommeil cast its strange pall over the expanse of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s December 7 concert at Walt Disney Hall with Esa-Pekka Salonen at the podium.