Happy birthday to the greatest living composer/conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Here he is in an excerpt from a performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Hair-raising, I’d say.
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Happy Birthday, Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Classical Life
I miss Salonen’s programming.
That is one of the recordings, even within the technical constraints of Youtube, that has fascinated me because of the way that performances by the LA Philharmonic differ from performances of other orchestras in other halls.The details, the nuances, of sound quality vary from group to group, from space to space.
I’m currently listening to a presentation of Copeland’s Appalachian Spring recorded in Disney Hall in February of this year. I’ve also listened to the same piece performed by the two main symphony orchestras based in Seattle and Boston. All three orchestras play admirably and similarly enough to make the remaining key difference a matter of the influence of their surroundings. (Gehry and Toyota in 2003: Hallelujah!)
Virtually every audio recording inside of WDCH was made by the sound-engineering team led by Fred Vogler. Therefore he and his associates deserve a huge amount of credit for making all those recordings sound as fine as they do. To the best of my knowledge, they do not work either in Seattle or in Boston.
To meaningfully compare acoustics of different concert halls, one would have to listen to the same orchestra with the same conductor play the same piece(s) in each one of those halls while personally visiting them all within a short period of time. Recordings by very different orchestras with very different conductors will never tell the acoustical story adequately, partially because not only the players and conductors but also the sound engineers are all totally different people with very different musical tastes and abilities. The best of those latter ones, with a great deal of help from the finest equipment available to them, are able to approximate the live sound while “enhancing” it, according to their aural preferences, by minimizing the problematic qualities of the hall’s acoustics as well as by highlighting their strongest and most advantageous features.
A person who declares that very different orchestras (such as BSO, LAPhil, Seattle), all led by completely different conductors, play something “similarly” cannot possibly be fully credible when it comes to judging sound quality. By the way, the last name of the composer who wrote Appalachian Spring, no matter where it is performed and by whom, is Copland.
One of my favorite performances of this work. Others “up there” for me are Boulez/Cleveland (their first recording of it) and Muti/Philadelphia
Really curious about the recording date of the Rite performance – E-PS looks about 19. 🙂
It’s from the very first concert at WDCH in 2003, so he was 45.
FWIW: As E-PS now approaches 60, I think he’s looking more and more like Paul McCartney, which by extension means that he also looks like Angela Lansbury: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5jul7AvTDHI/UM95s0dkV2I/AAAAAAAANWw/gsMoHhRvf9U/w506-h342/PaulM-AngelaL.jpg
(h/t to Craig Ferguson)
Hahahaha, but Esa-Pekka is a lot cuter than McCartney.
You are exaggerating just a little bit, Lisa. According to my very precise and highly scientific calculations, EPS always looks exactly half his age. That is why in this video he looks as if he is still in his early twenties, but now, thirteen years later, he looks far more mature — about 29 or so.