Both appointments will be for five years to start and include duties like organizing festivals, programming and commissioning. Salonen’s broad mandate will be to think beyond conventional concert formats and bring together different disciplines, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and on the sprawling campus of the Philharmonie.
Beyond creative duties, Salonen will have conducting commitments in both cities, like a conventional music director: six weeks with the Philharmonic and eight weeks with the Orchestre de Paris, which is housed in the Philharmonie’s main concert hall. The two cities will also take part in the Salonen International Conducting Fellowship, a training program that he will oversee.
Salonen jokingly said he was enjoying this “senior citizen” phase of his life, in which “movie tickets are a little cheaper and these positions become available.” But he is also emerging from a disruptive period in his career, in which he left San Francisco when the music directorship there deteriorated over the orchestra’s financial difficulties and his disagreements with its leadership over how to move forward.
The Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris, he added, “share the same goals as I do, which has not always been the case in my professional life.” He was the music director in Los Angeles from 1992 to 2007, and opened Disney Hall. In Paris, where he has conducted for several decades, he has been involved with ambitious programming, like an immense staging of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Romeo Castellucci, and a version of Pierre Boulez’s “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna” with a dance by Benjamin Millepied.
Both orchestras have looming vacancies for a music director, who in a typical leadership model is responsible for conducting concerts, hiring players and helping to shape an ensemble’s identity. At the end of the coming season, Gustavo Dudamel will leave Los Angeles to become the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. Klaus Mäkelä will leave the Orchestre de Paris in 2027, to join the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.,
