L.A.'s Fair-Haired Finn

By Michael Walsh

The scene was a hip little hair salon off Los Angeles' Melrose Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. A personable young man with Hollywood good looks and a funny foreign name was getting his wavy, dark-blond hair cut. The barber struck up a conversation. "So," she inquired, "what do you do?" He replied that he worked with the local symphony orchestra. "Wow!" she exclaimed. "What instrument do you play?" Actually, he said, he was the conductor -- had she ever attended a concert? "Of course not," she said, and went back to cutting his hair.

All right, so he's not yet a household name, at least in the U.S. But if Esa-Pekka Salonen has his way, that woman -- and thousands of people like her -- will be flocking downtown someday soon to see and hear him lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic. "I want to make the Philharmonic an essential part of life here," says the Finnish-born Salonen, 34, whose ambition is nothing less than the revitalization of the 200-year-old European symphonic tradition. And this in a fast-forward American city where this morning is already out of date and last week was a lifetime ago.

"What I'm trying to do is prepare the orchestra for the next millennium," says Salonen, whose initial three-year contract as the orchestra's 10th music director in 73 years began this season. The city's brief classical-music history doesn't bother him at all. "I don't see myself as the savior of the Central European tradition in a backwater," he says. "On the contrary, the relative lack of tradition in L.A. is attractive. Central Europe can be very stuffy."

Salonen's goals include introducing more contemporary music to the orchestra's staid programs -- a recent concert included two works by Gyorgy Ligeti, with the avant-garde Hungarian composer present -- and splitting the orchestra up into smaller, more flexible ensembles suited to the music of the classical period. Such notions are a marketing department's nightmare, but Salonen is adamant: "The orchestra must be a source of enlightenment." After 11 years of the saintly Carlo Maria Giulini and the ineffectual Andre Previn, the Philharmonic is ready for a youthquake. But even though Salonen is its youngest conductor since Zubin Mehta was appointed in 1962 at the age of 26, there is little danger that he will try to move the Music Center closer to Beverly Hills, 90210. He's not that hip.

Indeed, he's something of a square. A self-described "uptight, serialism- oriented, would-be intellectual," Salonen was educated as a composer in his native Helsinki, in the manner of such daunting dodecaphonists as Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Nono and Elliott Carter. His conducting career began as an adjunct to his composing at the Sibelius Academy, but it took off in 1983 when he stepped in for Michael Tilson Thomas on a week's notice to lead the London Philharmonia in Mahler's woolly mammoth, the Symphony No. 3 -- despite the fact that prior to the call he had never even looked at the score.

On the podium, Salonen projects an aura of crisp, businesslike authority. There is none of Mehta's grandstanding glamour; instead, the conductor he most resembles is his hero Pierre Boulez, guiding his players through the most intricate rhythms with unflappable aplomb. In 1985 Salonen signed an exclusive contract with CBS, now Sony Classical, and since then has issued a steady stream of albums (the best so far: Messiaen's formidable Turangalila-Symphonie and Grieg's Peer Gynt music). Already he is one of the few living maestros who can sell the standard repertoire on the strength of his name alone.

He is a reluctant celebrity, however, more at home in musico-philosophical discussion than in talking about his personal life. Married to the Welsh violinist Jane Price since August 1991, he has a nine-month-old daughter, Ella Aneira, and lives in the elegant west Los Angeles district of Brentwood, as well as in London and Stockholm. His personal style runs toward Scandinavian informality; after a concert, he can't wait to shower, change into a sweater and jeans and kick back with a cold beer. He speaks five languages fluently. These days he uses mostly English and Swedish; it is his Finnish that is growing rusty. "In a way I have lost my national identity," he told a Swedish magazine, "but I knew that would happen."

Such is the price of a fast-paced international career. Salonen already knows the dangers firsthand: while conducting a concert of new music a few years ago with his other orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony, he temporarily blacked out, exhausted, and had to start over. He hopes to avoid being a "jet-lag conductor" by settling professionally in Los Angeles. Next season will be his last in Stockholm. "Being music director of one orchestra is enough," he says. But an added attraction in California is the enterprising Music Center Opera company; he's talking about leading a Boris Godunov there in 1995.

* So, in the best movie tradition, a self-effacing young man from a small, socialized country is being hailed up and down Santa Monica Boulevard by banners welcoming him to his new West Coast home. Call it Mr. Salonen Goes to Hollywood. Or maybe Esa-Pekka Does Disneyland. In four years the orchestra will move from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the Music Center to the $114 million, Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall under construction nearby. Salonen's high-concept dream: "To conduct Bruckner in Walt Disney Hall -- a meeting of Bruckner and Donald Duck. Both were part of my tradition. Both are immortal." And both speak a universal language, even if it isn't Finnish.

With reporting by Ulla Plon/Copenhagen