Esa-Pekka Salonen’s guest conducting engagements in the season 2008/09 include appearances with the the NDR-Sinfonieorchester, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. With the Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen will perform several concerts across the whole of Europe, among them Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam, Gothenburg, Vienna and Madrid. He will tour Asia with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October 2008.

Salonen has been Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1992. Highlights include residencies at the Salzburg Festival, Köln Philharmonie and at the Théâtre du Châtelet as well as numerous European tours and guest performances in Japan. In November 2007, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic could be heard in Europe on a tour that took them to London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon. The program focused on Sibelius, honoring the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, and also presented works by Salonen, Saariaho and Stucky.

In Los Angeles, major projects include a semi-staged production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, directed by Peter Sellars, with video artist Bill Viola and produced as a co-production with the Paris National Opera and a festival focusing on music composed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, presented in honour of the 20th anniversary of his début with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Salonen is the recipient of many major awards including the Siena Prize by the Accademia Chigiana in 1993, the first conductor ever to receive the prize; in 1995 he was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Opera Award and in 1997 received their Conductor Award. In 1998 he was awarded the rank of Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In May 2003 he received an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy in Finland and in 2005 the Helsinki Medal of the city. Musical America named Salonen as its "Musician of the Year 2006".

Esa-Pekka Salonen is renowned for his interpretations of contemporary music and has given countless premieres of new works. He has led critically acclaimed festivals of music by Berlioz, Ligeti, Schönberg, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky and Magnus Lindberg. In April 2006 he returned to Opéra Bastille to conduct the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s new opera, Adriana Mater, after having conducted the Finnish premiere of her first opera L’amour de loin in 2004. In August 2007, he conducted Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone in a production by Peter Sellars at the Helsinki Festival (first Finnish performance) and then took the production to Stockholm, to the Baltic Sea Festival.

Salonen co-initiated this festival in 2003 and is currently its artistic director. As an annual event in August in Stockholm and across the Baltic Sea region it invites celebrated orchestras, conductors and soloists to promote unity and ecological awareness among the countries around the Baltic Sea.

Esa-Pekka Salonen records for Deutsche Grammophon. Releases include a disc of Salonen works performed with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and a DVD of Kaija Saariaho’s opera, L’Amour de loin with the Finnish National Opera as well as two CDs with Hélčne Grimaud with works by Pärt and Schumann.

The first recording of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Salonen for Deutsche Grammophon (Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – the first CD recording ever at Walt Disney Concert Hall) was released in October 2006 and nominated for a Grammy in December 2007. After recording for Sony Classical for many years, Salonen has an extensive discography with repertoire ranging from Mahler and Revueltas to Magnus Lindberg and his own works.

In the middle of a flourishing career as a composer, Pärt abruptly stopped writing music in 1968. During the next eight years, after turning away from the dramatic twelve-tone works for which he was well known in his native Estonia, he began to study medieval music. This self-imposed exile brought about one of the most remarkable stylistic changes a composer can undergo. When Pärt finally broke his silence in 1976, it was with a tiny, astonishingly spare piano piece, Für Alina, a quiet and unassuming score of extremely high and low notes, sounding like distant bells. (This music recalls Pärt's childhood experiments on the family piano, a huge concert grand with a damaged middle register, which forced him to play only at the top and bottom of the keyboard.) "That was the first piece that was on a new plateau," Pärt says. "It was here that I discovered the triad series, which I made my simple, little guiding rule."

The music that has followed--and made him a cult figure--is austere and meditative, suffused with a stillness and a gentle strength that sets it apart not only from Pärt's earlier work ("It's as if it's by another person," he says), but from almost any music ever written. Because he uses so few notes and so much repetition, in a largely tonal context, he often has been labeled a minimalist. But Pärt's quiet, nuanced, and deeply emotional voice has little in common with the bracing urban sound world of such composers as Philip Glass or Steve Reich. ("Am I really a minimalist?" Pärt once asked, with customary detachment. "It's not something that concerns me.") Instead, Pärt has picked his own word, tintinnabuli, from the Latin for bells, to label his recent work.

Pärt has steadfastly refused to talk about his own music in detail. ("Franz Schubert explained nothing," he once said. "He wrote songs. They are the best explaining.") He admits few specific influences, although the death of Benjamin Britten in late 1976 affected him deeply at the time he was beginning to compose again. ("I had just discovered Britten for myself," Pärt remembers. "Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music.") His few, carefully chosen words about his own born-again simplicity are often quoted:

I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements, with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials--with the triad with one specific tonality.

Pärt's Third Symphony was one of just two works he composed during his eight-year exile (the other was subsequently withdrawn), and it marked a turning point in his search for a new style. It is the only work of its kind in his output, filled with the intensity and toughness of the preceding music, but already touched by the stillness and repose of the new tintinnabuli works--it offers the first glimpse of the unexpected road ahead. Päaut;rt called it a "joyous piece of music," but not yet "the end of my despair and my search."

In 1977, Pärt wrote what are now often considered his signature works: Tabula Rasa, which, as its title suggests, was written on the blank slate of his newfound style; the first in an extended family of pieces called Fratres (Brothers); and the Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten. (The CSO has played the Third Symphony, Fratres, and the Britten memorial.) Since then, he has written mostly for chorus or small vocal ensemble. Lamentate, scored for piano and orchestra and premiered in 2002, was his first large-scale, big-boned work that could be considered at all symphonic in scope in many years. (It is a homage to the monumental sculpture Marsyas by Anish Kapoor, the artist of Cloudgate in Chicago's Millennium Park.)

In 2007, while Pärt was studying an ancient Slavonic Church canon about a guardian angel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic asked him for a new piece. The connection between the angel and a city named for the angels proved irresistible, and so, in 2008, Pärt began the first symphony in his "new" style--thirty-seven years after his previous symphony. (The score was posted online for free by Pärt's publisher, Universal Editions, a month before its premiere last week in Los Angeles, surely a first for an important new work from a major composer.) The symphony incorporates Pärt's These Words . . . , a shorter piece for strings and percussion that premiered last May.

With a characteristic economy of means--even in the "biggest" piece he has written in years--Pärt draws a richly expressive world of sounds. Every gesture carries weight; each shift in sonority or mood feels notable. From the ethereal opening haze to the smudge of A major and minor chords with which it ends, the symphony conveys monumentality, complexity, and even ambiguity with the simplest of means: sustained chords, stepwise melodies, rolling arpeggios, repeating rhythms, grand pauses, tolling bells, deep timpani punctuation. There are three movements, the middle one (marked Affannoso, or difficult, labored) is a powerful anchor in Pärt's austere, otherwordly landscape.

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Pärt has dedicated the score to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oligarch, offering the following comments: "It would seem to me that the person of Mikhail Khodorkovsky needs no introduction. His name, and the story connected with it, have received widespread attention in the West. With my composition, I would like to reach out my hand extending it to the prisoner, and in his person to all those imprisoned without rights in Russia. I dedicate my Fourth Symphony to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, wishing him peace of soul and vigilance of mind; anything more is beyond my power. I do not know whether he will ever be able to hear this composition. Nevertheless, I hope that my carrier pigeon does reach faraway Siberia one day."

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Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Like the great British painter J. M. W. Turner, who stared at the sea for hours and then went inside to paint, Debussy worked from memory, occasionally turning for inspiration to a few other sources. Debussy first mentioned his new work in a letter dated September 12, 1903; the title he proposed for the first of the three symphonic sketches, "Calm Sea around the Sanguinary Islands," was borrowed from a short story by Camille Mauclair published during the 1890s. When Debussy's own score was printed, he insisted that the cover include a detail from The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa, the most celebrated print by the Japanese artist Hokusai, then enormously popular in France.

We also know that Debussy greatly admired Turner's work. His richly atmospheric seascapes recorded the daily weather, the time of day, and even the most fleeting effects of wind and light in ways utterly new to painting, and they spoke directly to Debussy. (In 1902, when Debussy went to London, where he saw a number of Turner's paintings, he enjoyed the trip but hated actually crossing the channel.) The name Debussy finally gave to the first section of La mer, From Dawn to Noon on the Sea, might easily be that of a Turner painting made sixty years earlier, for the two shared not only a love of subject but also of long, specific, evocative titles.

There's something in Debussy's first symphonic sketch very like a Turner painting of the sun rising over the sea. They both reveal, in their vastly different media, those magical moments when sunlight begins to glow in near darkness, when familiar objects emerge from the shadows. This was Turner's favorite image--he even owned several houses from which he could watch, with undying fascination, the sun pierce the line separating sea and sky. Debussy's achievement, though decades later than Turner's, is no less radical, for it uses familiar language in truly fresh ways. From Dawn to Noon on the Sea can't be heard as traditional program music, for it doesn't tell a tale along a standard time line (although Debussy's friend Eric Satie reported that he "particularly liked the bit at a quarter to eleven"). Nor can it be read as a piece of symphonic discourse, for it is organized without regard for conventional theme and development. Debussy's audiences, like Turner's before him, were baffled by work that takes as its subject matter color, texture, and nuance.

Debussy's second sketch too is all suggestion and shimmering surface, fascinated with sound for its own sake. Melodic line, rhythmic regularity, and the use of standard harmonic progressions are all shattered, gently but decisively, by the fluid play of the waves. The final Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea (another title so like Turner's) captures the violence of two elements, air and water, as they collide. At the end, the sun breaks through the clouds. La mer repeatedly resists traditional analysis. "We must agree," Debussy writes, "that the beauty of a work of art will always remain a mystery, in other words, we can never be absolutely sure 'how it's made'."

La mer was controversial even during rehearsals, when, as Debussy told Stravinsky, the violinists tied handkerchiefs to the tips of their bows in protest. The response at the premiere was mixed, though largely unfriendly. It is hard now to separate the reaction to this novel and challenging music from the current Parisian view of the composer himself, for during the two years he worked on La mer, Debussy moved in with Emma Bardac, the wife of a local banker, leaving behind his wife Lily, who attempted suicide. Two weeks after the premiere of La mer, Bardac gave birth to Debussy's child, Claude-Emma, later known as Chou-Chou. Debussy married Emma Bardac on January 20, 1908. The night before, he conducted an orchestra for the first time in public, in a program which included La mer. This time, it was a spectacular success, though many of his friends still wouldn't speak to him.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Gustavo Dudamel's 2008-09 season opened with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra's October tour of Europe, including performances in Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, and Spain. In November 2008, he toured the US with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, performing at New York's Carnegie Hall, Washington DC's Kennedy Center, Philadelphia's Kimmel Center, and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, among others. Following the tour, Dudamel conducted two subscription weeks with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In December, Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra made a debut Asian tour to Japan, China, and Korea, and later this season in 2009, he tours with them to the US and Europe. Additional appearances in winter/spring 2009 are with Staatskapelle Berlin, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra on a UK tour, the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, Berliner Philharmoniker, and the Berlin Staatsoper among others. In April, he makes his debut and tours with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Gustavo Dudamel has been an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2005. His debut recording, Beethoven 5&7 with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, was released worldwide in September 2006, and received the 2007 Echo Award (Germany) for "New Artist of the Year." His second recording with the SBYO, Mahler 5, was released in May 2007, and was chosen as the only classical album on iTunes' "Next Big Thing." Released in May 2008, Dudamel's third album with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, FIESTA, is - as the title suggests - a "fiesta" of Latin-American works, including Revueltas' Sensemayá, Carreńo's Margariteńa, and Estévez's Melodia en el Llano, and Bernstein's Mambo. Dudamel's next recording with the SBYO, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 and Francesca da Rimini, will be released in February 2009. His DVDs include The Promise of Music, a documentary and concert with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra released in 2008, and Birthday Concert for Pope Benedict XVI released in 2007.

News of Gustavo Dudamel's talent spread worldwide after his triumph at the inaugural Bamberger Symphoniker Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in May 2004. Born in 1981 in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he studied violin at the Jacinto Lara Conservatory with José Luis Jiménez and later, with José Francisco del Castillo, at the Latin American Academy of Violin. In 1996, he began his conducting studies with Rodolfo Saglimbeni and during the same year was named Music Director of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra. In 1999, along with assuming the Music Director position of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, he began conducting studies with José Antonio Abreu, the Orchestra's founder. In May 2007, Dudamel was awarded the Premio de la Latinidad by the Union Latina an honor, given for outstanding contributions to Latin cultural life, which is presented by the 37 Latin American and African member states of the Union Latina organization. In 2008, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra was granted Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, given annually by the Principle Foundation of Asturias in Spain. Dudamel was awarded the 2007 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Young Artists and, most recently, along with his mentor Dr. Abreu, the 2008 "Q Prize" from Harvard University for extraordinary service to children.