Salonen at Tanglewood Curates the Nordic Modernist Lineage

Esa-Pekka Salonen closed the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music not with a survey of his influences but with a portrait of his own classmates -- a program built entirely from composers who came up alongside him in Helsinki in the late 1970s, when Finland's new-music scene was small enough to fit in one apartment.

That apartment scene had a name: Korvat auki, "Ears Open," a society founded in 1977 by a handful of Sibelius Academy students -- Salonen among them, alongside Kaija Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg, and Jouni Kaipainen -- explicitly to smuggle contemporary European music into a conservatory culture still organized almost entirely around the shadow of one man, Jean Sibelius. Ears Open ran seminars, imported scores from Darmstadt and Paris, and eventually spun off performing ensembles built to play the music no established Finnish institution would program.

What's striking, decades later, is how little of that youthful radicalism ended up sounding radical. The group absorbed the fragmented, pointillist rigor of the Continental avant-garde but kept something distinctly Sibelian underneath it: long melodic lines that grow organically rather than accumulate in shards, and an orchestral palette built outward from winds and brass rather than strings. Salonen's own Wing on Wing is as good an example as any -- written for the 2004 opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall, its two soprano lines drawn in part from recordings of a plainfin midshipman fish, the whole piece unfolding with an almost old-fashioned patience for how a musical line grows.

None of this would have been possible without money that didn't have to answer to a box office. Finland funds composers the way most countries fund infrastructure -- as a long-term public good rather than a bet on hits -- and that state-funded runway is a large part of why a group of twenty-year-olds with a manifesto became, within a decade, some of the most performed composers of their generation rather than a forgotten student clique.

The Tanglewood program also arrived after Ears Open lost one of its most singular fellow travelers: Leif Segerstam, the conductor and composer who died in October 2024 having written more symphonies than anyone in the history of the form -- past 370 of them, several composed between rehearsals, with subtitles as unpredictable as their numbering. Segerstam wasn't a founding member of the society, but he was one of the first major conductors to take its composers seriously, programming their early scores while Finland's larger institutions were still skeptical.

Framed that way, Salonen's concert reads less like nostalgia than a relay handoff -- the same act of programming insurgency that a handful of students pulled off in a Helsinki apartment in 1977, restaged decades later by the people who once needed someone else to take the risk on them.