Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen Featured on Symphony @ 7

All this week, we're featuring the Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on Symphony @ 7.  He recently won the ECHO Klassik Award for Conductor of the Year for his recordings of the symphonies of Witold Lutaslawski released as a set on the Sony Classical label. Esa-Pekka Salonene was born in 1958 and is currently the Principal Conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London and is Conductor Laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  He was the music director of that orchestra for 17 years, from 1992 to 2009, when Gustavo Dudamel became its most recent music director.  Salonen is also a composer.  In 2009 Leila Josefowicz  was the soloist for the world premier of his Violin Concerto with the L. A. Phil.  He said he would like to conduct Wagner's Parsifal, but he turned down an offer to conduct the Ring Cycle at Bayreuth. We began yesterday with Salonen's recording of Lutoslawski's Third Symphony with the L. A. Phil and Bartok's Third Piano Concerto with Yefim Bronfman.  This evening on Symphony @ 7, after we hear Mozart with John Eliot Gardiner, we'll have Esa-Pekka Salonen leading the Philharmonia Orchestra for Franz Liszt's Second Piano Concerto in a 1992 recording with Emanuel Ax. Still to come this week, we'll hear music of Carl Nielsen, Jean Sibelius and Hector Berlioz with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting here on Classical 101.  Here is the maestro describing the role of the conductor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILkYMD8zuH8 Here he is talking about Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKBzztc44DU