Okay, start with the image of a classical orchestra
conductor. Like, just close your eyes for a second.
What do you see? Oh, probably the maestro on
the mountaintop? Right. It's usually a very specific
caricature, someone old, probably a bit tyrannical,
white hair flying everywhere, obsessed with the
past, and frankly, terrified of the future. Yeah,
that's a very 19th century idea. You know, the
isolated genius who stands with his back to the
audience and just communes with God while everyone
else is... just trying to keep up. Exactly. But
today, we are doing a deep dive into someone
who took that caricature, completely shattered
it, and then rebuilt the pieces into something
totally new. Issa Pekka -Salone. Issa Pekka -Salone.
And based on the massive stack of sources we
have here, we're talking biographies, concert
reviews, and all the breaking news from late
2025 and early 2026. This really isn't just a
story about a guy waving a stick. Not at all.
I mean, Slumman is what I call a hybrid creative.
He's a composer who became a world famous conductor
almost by accident. Which is wild. It is. He's
a guy who deeply respects the history of music.
He loves Stravinsky, for instance. But he also
loves Apple products and cutting edge tech. And
crucially, for our discussion today with you
all, he's a fascinating study in leadership.
Specifically, how you navigate that tightrope
between rigid tradition and absolute innovation.
And we have some serious ground to cover regarding
his career management, too, because if you've
been following the arts news over the last 12
months, you know he's been at the center of a
pretty significant storm in the classical world.
Oh, absolutely. Moving from San Francisco back
to Los Angeles under some very unique circumstances.
Right. It's a classic case of creative differences
on a massive institutional scale. But to understand
why his moves in 2026 matter and why he's creating
this entirely new creative director role for
himself, we really have to understand where he
came from. Because he didn't start out wanting
to lead orchestras. No, in fact, he kind of actively
avoided it. That's the part of the research that
jumped out at me immediately. He was born in
Helsinki, Finland in 1958. He goes to the famous
Sibelius Academy, but he's not there to be the
guy in the spotlight. No, he was a horn player.
Which is, well, let's be honest. The French horn
is the most stressful instrument in the orchestra.
Oh, without a doubt. It's the one where if you
miss a note, it sounds like a dying goose and
everyone turns to look at you. It's the Miss
Note Factory. It's incredibly difficult. And
I think that really shapes his psychology early
on. If you're a horn player, you learn humility
very quickly because the instrument will just
embarrass you if you aren't careful. But his
real passion wasn't playing. It was writing.
He studied composition. He was part of this group
called Corvette Aukey. Which translates to ears
open, right? Exactly. Ears open. They were these
young fiery Finnish idealists. They wanted to
shake up the establishment. They felt Finnish
music was way too stuck in the past, too obsessed
with Sibelius. They wanted to open Finnish ears
to the rest of the world. Right. And this is
the funny part. Solonen only picked up the baton.
He only started conducting for self -defense.
Wait, self -defense? Like physical self -defense?
Artistic self -defense. He realized that if he
wanted his own compositions to be played correctly,
or frankly played at all, he had to be the one
to lead them. He didn't trust anyone else to
get the nuance right. So he viewed conducting
as this necessary evil to support his composing
habit. He wasn't chasing power. He was chasing
accuracy. So he's a reluctant leader, which ironically
is often the best kind. But then we hit 1983,
and this is the moment that feels like it's straight
out of a Hollywood movie script. The classic
understudy steps up trope. It really is. So the
Philharmonie Orchestra in London, which is one
of the best in the world, is scheduled to perform
Mahler's Symphony No. 3. Now, for those of you
who aren't Mahler nerds, we need to context set
here. This is not a tight little 20 mini Mozart
symphony. Right. Give us the scale. What are
we dealing with? Mahler 3 is a universe. It is
roughly 100 minutes long. It requires a massive
orchestra, a women's choir, a boy's choir, and
an alto soloist. It is structurally complex,
emotionally exhausting, and technically a complete
minefield. And the scheduled conductor, the legendary
Michael Tilson Thomas, falls ill. He can't do
it. And the orchestra management looks at their
Rolodex and lands on a 25 -year -old Finnish
guy who nobody knows. They call Solonen. And
here is the absolute kicker. He had never studied
the score before. Wait, pause right there. He
hadn't studied it. I assumed he knew it really
well and just hadn't conducted it yet. You're
saying he went in cold. He knew the music as
a listener, of course. He probably had the sound
of it in his head. But there is a massive difference
between listening to a record in your living
room and knowing how to signal the entrance of
the oboe in the third movement while balancing
the tempo of the strings. That's terrifying.
He accepted the gig on extremely short notice.
He essentially crammed for the exam of a lifetime
in a matter of days. That is the definition of
a high -risk, high -reward maneuver. Most people
would crumble. I mean, standing in front of a
hundred professional musicians who were probably
highly skeptical of this kid. Most would totally
crumble. But Salonen has this icy Nordic cool.
He stepped onto the podium and by all accounts,
it was a sensation. Wasn't just good enough.
It was a revelation. Incredible. Overnight, literally
overnight, he went from Issa Peckahoo to the
hottest young property in Europe. By 1985, he
was the principal guest conductor of that very
same orchestra. So he conquers Europe. He's the
golden boy. But then he makes a move that, at
the time, must have seemed really confusing to
the establishment. In 1992, he heads to the American
West Coast. He takes over the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
And this is the pivot point. This is where the
hybrid we talked about earlier really gets built.
You have to understand the baggage he arrived
with. He came from the European avant -garde
tradition. Can we unpack that term for a second?
Avant -garde gets thrown around a lot, but musically,
what did that actually mean for him in the 80s?
It meant modernism with a capital M. Think of
someone like Pierre Boulet. The philosophy was
very intellectual, very mathematical. Salonan
later described it as being inculcated with negatives.
Inculcated with negatives. Meaning what, exactly?
Meaning the rules were all about what you could
not do. You couldn't write a catchy melody that
was considered cheap. You couldn't have a steady
foot -tapping rhythmic pulse. That was way too
simplistic. If the audience left the concert
hall whistling a tune, you had essentially failed
as a serious composer. It sounds completely exhausting,
like art designed specifically to alienate the
people experiencing it. Like, if you enjoyed
this, I did it wrong. It was very cerebral. It
was paper music, brilliant on the page, intricate
mathematics, but often very cold to the ear.
So, Salonan lands in Los Angeles with this strict
mindset, and there's this great story about an
older player in the L .A. Phil coming up to him
after his first concert in 1984, before he even
officially took the job. What did he say? He
said, consider this your future home. Which is
welcoming, but also a bit of a prophecy. It was,
because the California environment physically
and mentally changed him. He started spending
time with American composers like John Adams.
Now, Adams is a minimalist. His music pulses,
it has drive. It's not afraid of beauty or repetition.
And I imagine the weather helps. It's got to
be hard to be a rigid, cold modernist when it's
75 degrees and sunny in January and you're driving
down the Pacific Coast Highway. Solonin explicitly
said the doggos of Europe started to feel ridiculous
in the California sun. He actually called his
old adherence to those rules madness He shifted
from what he called the ideological principle
doing things just because the theory says so
to the pleasure principle The pleasure principle,
that sounds so much better for everyone involved.
It really does. It means allowing yourself to
enjoy the sound, allowing the rhythm to groove.
And the tangible result of this internal shift
was his piece, LA Variations, which premiered
in 1997. And this was his big breakout hit as
a composer. Huge hit. It's one of the most performed
orchestral works of the last 30 years. It's brilliant.
because it doesn't dumb anything down. It is
still incredibly technically difficult and virtuosic,
but it has this joy, this kinetic energy that
he simply wouldn't have written back in Finland.
It's a great example of how your environment
shapes your output. If you stay in the same room,
you write the same book. If you move to a new
continent, you write something else entirely.
Precisely. But speaking of rooms and houses,
we really have to talk about this Stravinsky
story. In all our research, this stood out to
me as the most humanizing moment for him and
a real key to understanding his psychology. Oh,
I love this story. So Igor Stravinsky, arguably
the most important composer of the 20th century,
lived in Beverly Hills for a long time. Right.
And when Stravinsky died and the house eventually
went up for sale, Salonan went to look at it.
He was seriously considering buying it. I mean,
just imagine the prestige. You tell people, come
over to my place. It used to be Sturinski's.
The ultimate power -mover conductor. Oh, this
old thing. Igor just left it here. Exactly. But
he walks into the study. He looks down at the
carpet, and he sees the indentations. The marks
left by the piano legs. Yes. He saw exactly where
Stravinsky's piano had stood. The exact spot
where masterpieces like The Rake's Progress and
Symphony of Psalms were written. And he just
froze. He said he realized he could never compose
in that room. He would just be sitting there
staring at the ghosts, trying to fill shoes that
were entirely too big. It's pure imposter syndrome,
isn't it? Even at his elite level. It is. But
it's also profound self -awareness. He realized
that to find his own voice, he couldn't literally
live in the house of his hero. He didn't buy
the house. He walked away. I think that is a
massive takeaway for anyone in a creative field.
You have to respect your idols, but you cannot
try to beat them. Exactly. He had to step out
of the shadow to become Salonan. And part of
becoming Salonan meant embracing things that
the ghosts of the past would never have even
touched, like technology. This is where he really
diverges from the old maestro stereotype. In
2014, he's in an Apple commercial. And not just
a little print ad in a magazine. No, he was the
star of the Your Verse campaign for the iPad
Air. He was shown composing on a tablet, whistling
a tune, climbing rocks, and then conducting.
I remember seeing that and thinking, wait, is
that a classical conductor on Brimetime TV? It
felt like a glitch in The Matrix. It was culturally
significant. It showed classical music not as
a dusty museum piece, but as a living, breathing,
tech -enabled art form. He even led the Philharmonia
Orchestra in a performance inside an Apple store
in Berlin. Which must have been a logistical
nightmare, by the way. Acoustics in a retail
store, glass and metal everywhere. Terrible acoustics,
probably. But the message was what mattered.
The message was, we are where the people are.
He didn't stop at ads, though. He actually helped
build tools. He worked on an iPad app called
The Orchestra. Slate called it the perfect classical
music app. It really was. It was developed with
TouchPress, and it allowed you to watch the score
scroll by in real time, isolate different sections
of the orchestra, watch different camera angles
of the musicians. It completely demystified the
process. It took the secret code of classical
music and gave the user the decoder ring. And
then there was the Rewrite project. Rewrite was
an award -winning installation. Giant video projections,
a massive sound system. You could literally walk
through the orchestra. You could stand next to
the violins, hear what they hear, then walk over
to the percussion. It broke the fourth wall between
the audience and the stage. It seems like his
mission has always been to lower the barrier
to entry without ever lowering the quality of
the art itself. That is the perfect way to put
it. He refuses to compromise on the complexity
of the music. As we said, he writes very difficult
stuff, but he wants to give you every possible
tool to understand it. He also served as an advisor
for the Sync Project, which was a global collaboration
researching how music affects brain health. So
he's constantly bringing art, science, and tech.
Well, speaking of difficult stuff, let's talk
about his compositions again. Because while LA
Variations is accessible and joyous, some of
his other work is, well, quirky is the polite
word. He has a wicked sense of humor. He is not
afraid of the bizarre. Take the piece Wing on
Wing from 2004. Ah, this is the one with the
fish. It is. It features two sopranos singing
these ethereal lines. It uses samples of the
architect Frank Gehry's voice that are distorted
and processed, and it uses the sound of the Plainfin
midshipman fish. Okay, I have to know. What does
a plainfin midshipman fish actually sound like?
Is it a splash? It's actually a hum. It's a low
drone. The fish vibrate their swim bladders to
attract mates. Salonan took that organic underwater
drone and made it a foundational texture in a
symphony. That is wild. It's taking nature sounds
to a weirdly specific level. Like, I need a C
sharp. Somebody get me the fish. And then you
have floof. I just like saying it. It sounds
like a brand of marshmallow fluff. It does, but
it's actually a piece from 1982 based on texts
by Stanisa Lem, the famous sci -fi author who
wrote Solaris. Lem wrote about cybernetic poetry
and machines trying to write verse. So, Salonen
wrote this piece for soprano and ensemble that
is jerky, mechanical, and incredibly acrobatic.
It's meant to sound exactly like a machine learning
how to emote. It really aligns with this quote
about music being bodily. Right. He says musical
expression is bodily expression. He hates abstract,
dry, cerebral music. Whether it's a fish humming
or a soprano pretending to be a malfunctioning
robot, he wants you to feel it in your gut. He
even wrote a piece called Concertitude for Solar
Horn, which is designed as a competition piece.
It's purely about testing the extreme physical
capability of the player. So we have the innovator,
the composer, the tech guy. But we need to bring
this up to the present day because we are in
2026 and the last few years, specifically the
San Francisco saga, have been incredibly dramatic.
Saga is definitely the right word. In 2020, Solonin
took over as music director of the San Francisco
Symphony. On paper, it was the perfect marriage.
The most tech savvy conductor in the world lands
in the tech capital of the world. But the honeymoon
didn't last. He left in 2025 just five years
later. What went wrong? It fundamentally came
down to money and vision. Post -pandemic, a lot
of orchestras were tightening their belts. The
Board of Governors in San Francisco wanted to
cut costs, reduce the number of concerts, and
generally play it safe. Salon wanted to push
forward, do more experimental projects, and grow.
And usually these disputes are kept strictly
behind closed doors. You get a polite press release
saying, he is leaving to pursue other opportunities
and everyone smiles for the camera. Exactly.
But Salonen went entirely off script. When he
announced he was leaving, he issued a highly
specific statement saying, quote, I do not share
the same goals for the future of the institution
as the Board of Governors does. Ouch. In the
polite, refined world of classical music, that
is effectively flipping the boardroom table.
There's a bombshell. Yeah. And the audience,
the patrons, actually sided with Salonen. They
were furious that the board was letting a visionary
walk away just to save a few dollars. It highlighted
a massive tension in the arts right now. Do you
cut costs to survive, or do you innovate to survive?
Salon clearly believes in the latter. And to
add insult to injury, right as he's walking out
the door in 2025, he wins a Grammy. Yes. The
San Francisco Symphony's recording of Kaija Saria
Ho's opera, Adriana Mader, conducted by Salonan,
won a Grammy Award. So he effectively dropped
the mic on his way out. It's like saying, here's
the award -winning excellence you're letting
go of. Goodbye. That is some serious style. Yeah.
So SF is in the past. Now, here we are in 2026,
and he has pulled a very interesting maneuver.
He's back in Los Angeles, but not as the boss.
This is the most fascinating development for
me. The LA Philharmonic created an entirely new
position specifically for him. They named him
the creative director. How is it different from
his old job as music director? The music director
is essentially the CEO of the art. You hire the
musicians, you fire them, you deal with all the
union negotiations, you plan the entire 52 -week
season. It is a grind. It's heavy administrative
lifting. The creative director role, starting
in 2026, is pure dessert. He conducts about six
weeks of concerts per year, he curates special
festivals, and he provides big picture ideas.
No administration, no endless fundraising dinners.
He isn't involved in general programming or hiring.
That sounds like the absolute dream. He gets
the artistic freedom and the prestige without
the boardroom headaches that drove him crazy
in San Francisco. Exactly. He learned his lesson.
He structured his life to protect his creativity,
and he's combining this with a major role in
Europe. He's the principal conductor designate
for the Orchestra de Paris, which ramps up fully
in the 2027 -2028 season. So he's splitting his
time between sunny LA and Paris. Not a bad set
up for this stage of his career. It's pure optimization.
He has removed the friction from his professional
life so he can focus entirely on the music. It's
a brilliantly strategic move. He knows exactly
what he's good at, and he knows what he hates.
He's simply cut out the part he hates. It really
brings us back to that hybrid idea we started
with. He's constantly reinventing the role of
the conductor to suit his own needs. He is. He's
someone who flatly refuses to be trapped by a
job title. When the European modernist box got
too small, he moved to LA. When the traditional
conductor box got too small, he built apps and
immersive installations. When the music director
box got too administrative, he just invented
a new creative director role. And he did it all
while avoiding Strudinski's carpet. That image
really sticks, doesn't it? It does. It's the
perfect metaphor for his entire career. It's
about recognizing greatness without being suffocated
by it. He didn't try to fill the indentations.
He just bought a different house. So if we're
pulling the final thread together for you listening
at home, what's the big takeaway here? Aside
from, you know, listen to more orchestral music,
which you absolutely should do. I think the real
takeaway is about having the courage to pivot.
Solomon was highly successful as a rigid modernist,
but he changed because it didn't feel authentic
anymore. He was successful as a traditional music
director, but he quit to find a better, healthier
model. He never let the way things are done dictate
the way he does things. And sometimes, that means
looking at the heavyweights in your own industry,
the Stravinsky's of your world, and saying, I
respect you, but I'm not going to sit in your
chair. Exactly. Find your own chair or stand
up. Or record a humming fish. or a quarter fish.
That works, too. Think about that Stravinsky
carpet moment in your own life. How often do
you let the ghosts of the past or the absolute
greats in your field intimidate you from doing
your own unique work? Salonen found his ultimate
voice by leaving that house behind, both literally
and metaphorically. It's a powerful thought to
leave on. That's it for this deep dive into the
fascinating world of Issa Pekka Salonen. Hopefully,
we've helped you see the man behind the baton
a little more clearly. Thanks for listening.
See you next time.