Esa-Pekka Salonen Philharmonia Orchestra

The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, after more than ten years, returns to the Costanzi Theater with a program dedicated to two composers who are among the first architects of the rediscovery of musical folklore, Béla Bartók and Jean Sibelius.

At the helm of the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, of which he was principal conductor from 2008 to 2021 and of which he is currently honorary director, in a single extraordinary date at the Opera, Salonen combines the Concerto for orchestra composed in 1943 by Bartók during the difficult years of his American exile, one of the concerts that decreed the success of the great Hungarian composer with first the American and then the European public, full of rhythmic asymmetries and motifs inspired by the Hungarian popular tradition, Symphony no. 1 composed in 1898 by Sibelius, structured in a traditional way, divided into four movements and characterized by a succession of solos, strings and woodwinds. The concert by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra is the first of the six symphonic proposals of the 2024/25 Season of the Rome Opera and precedes the official inauguration of the Opera Theatre, which opens at the end of November with the Simon Boccanegra by Verdi conducted by Michele Mariotti.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Finnish conductor and composer, studied horn, composition and conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. His first international performance was in 1983 with the Philharmonia Orchestra, when he conducted Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony, which received great acclaim from both critics and public. Salonen is the current principal conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.