Top 37 Quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.