ESA-PEKKA SALONEN: Helix for orchestra; Dichotomie for piano solo; Piano Concerto – Yefim Bronfman, piano/Los Angeles Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen – DGG 00289 477 8103 ****:
Don’t be confused by the Super jewel case in which this CD comes; it is not a SACD but Universal seems to be using up a stock of the rounded-corner cases since they have given up on the SACD format. Nevertheless, it is some excellent new music in very good 44.1K stereo sonics.
Having just auditioned conductor Lorin Maazel’s opera 1984, here are three works from the Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who surprisingly begins his comments in the notes with “I think of myself basically as a composer, with a little conducting on the side to help pay the bills.” Actually, he is a complete success at both professions and demonstrates it in this disc. He’s been Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1992 and lives there. He has made the orchestra progressive and well-regarded, taking it on successful world tours. At the end of the current season he will relinquish his post to Gustavo Dudamel and spend more time on composing.
Helix is a nine-minute work commissioned by the BBC, which had its premiere at an LA computer store were Salonen demonstrated his use of a compositional software program called Sibelius. It is a short tone poem in the form of a spiral or coil. Dichotomie is a two-movement piano work, and the composer compares the first movement – Mechanisme – to a Tinguely mobile.
The order of the Piano Concerto and Dichotomie are completely reversed on the disc vs. the listing on the jewel box. Both Dichotomie and Helix are CD premieres and this is the recording premiere of the Piano Concerto which has been performed a number of times now since its world premiere in 2007 with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist and Salonen conducting. The concerto is a celebration of a musical friendship between the two musicians. It possesses complex contemporary harmonic design but overall is Romantic in feeling. Bronfman’s part is extremely virtuosic, often using percussive attacks in the style of Prokofiev piano works. The second movement of the 33-minute concerto is an homage to a Polish sci-fi author and imagines a post-biologic world where the cybernetic systems develop a need for folklore – heard as “bird-robot” sounds in the piano part – but quite different from Messiaen’s bird sounds. The final movement is a sort of rondo using a chain of five chords as a recurrent idea. The concerto is most colorful and exciting; it is easy to see why it has been popular with concert audiences in spite of its ultramodern writing.
– John Sunier
