LA now has to share it's magnificent conductor with London.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...950313,00.html
London music on a high as Philharmonia lures Salonen
Martin Kettle
Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian
The internationally acclaimed Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is to join the Philharmonia Orchestra in London as its principal conductor from next year, the Guardian can reveal. He will succeed Christoph von Dohnanyi, who has held the post since 1997.
For the past 14 years Salonen has been with the the Los Angeles Philharmonic, raising it to such a level that it is now regarded as America's top symphony orchestra. He will remain in charge in Los Angeles when be takes over the Philharmonia. The Philharmonia's coup in capturing Salonen - whose services the New York Philharmonic had made little secret of wanting - sets up the prospect of a new golden age for London's orchestras, three of which have recently secured the services of some of the most sought-after musical directors in the world.
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The London Philharmonic which, like the Philharmonia, will again be based at the Royal Festival Hall when the South Bank's current modernisation and rebuilding programme is completed in autumn 2007, will be headed by the Russian maestro Vladimir Jurowski, who takes over from Kurt Masur. Jurowski is also the music director of the Glyndebourne Festival.
The London Symphony, based at the Barbican, will be headed by the protean Ossetian conductor Valery Gergiev, who is due to take over from Sir Colin Davis in January 2007.
That leaves the Royal Philharmonic, headed since 1996 by the Italian conductor Daniele Gatti, as the only one of the four without a recent change at the top. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, which is sometimes regarded as London's "fifth orchestra" - though not by itself, as it is funded by the licence fee rather than by Arts Council England - also has a relatively new chief, the Czech conductor Jiri Belohlavek.
In this new battle of the batons the only certain winners look likely to be the music public, who can look forward to an orchestral life of a quality and diversity with which no other city can compete.
Salonen's arrival in London on a permanent basis will make the Philharmonia the most natural home for contemporary music among the four. He is a prolific composer, and his own music is certain to feature in his programming plans. But his wide-ranging, non-traditional approach to his orchestras make him the closest thing any of them could have found to Sir Simon Rattle. Short of tempting Rattle back from the Berlin Philharmonic, it is hard to think of a more exciting appointment for the Philharmonia to have made.
Salonen, who studied horn, conducting and composing in Helsinki in the 1970s, considered himself a conducting composer until his London debut in 1983, when he took over a performance of Mahler's third symphony with the Philharmonia at short notice. He became a composing conductor virtually overnight.
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