Salonen reviews

Experiencing the rapt concentration and infinitely subtle emotional and dynamic terracing of these performances, you’d barely credit this as the same player who burst on to the scene almost exactly ten years ago with a dashingly virtuoso coupling of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos. There is now an almost Zehetmair-like, probing, nothing-taken-for-granted quality about Leila Josefowicz’s playing that marks out this, her first (immaculately engineered) release on Warner, and suggests absorbing and exciting new musical possibilities.

Esa-Pekka Salonen is far more than a virtuoso conductor who also composes. As these three works reveal, the gorgeous or scintillating orchestration is only one of the features that make this music so memorable and instantly appealing. Foreign Bodies is also strongly argued, bursting with energy and full of the kind of ravishing sound-vistas that makes one want to go back and indulge again and again.

That Esa-Pekka Salonen should turn out to be a virtuoso orchestrator is no surprise – after all, he’s had ten years experience as principal conductor of a virtuoso American orchestra. The surprise is that from intellectually narrow modernist beginnings he should have matured into such an uncomplicatedly direct, Romantically open-hearted composer.