It’s always exciting when former LA Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to his former home. But what makes these concerts on Friday and Saturday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall exciting is not the two composers whose names head the program listing.
Of course, it is always entertaining to hear a violinist tackle Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as Daniel Lozakovich will do here. And Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is also a crowd-pleaser and will be given an exciting performance by Salonen and the orchestra.
What truly makes this concert a not-to-miss event are the first twelve minutes. During that time audiences will get the world premiere of Salonen’s Castor. The LA Philharmonic commissioned Salonen to write this piece.
While he was composing Pollux (more information below), he found his creative instincts going in opposite directions. Realizing that what he had started and where he was going had to be two different pieces, he split them and created Castor.
As Salonen says in the notes for Castor:
“This made me think of the myth of the non-identical twins Castor and Pollux who share half of their DNA, but have some extreme phenotype differences, and experience dramatically different fates.”
Pollux was given its first performance when Gustavo Dudamel conducted the LA Philharmonic in April of 2018. Like Castor, it ran 12 minutes.
18th century composer Jean-Phillippe Rameau was also inspired by this myth and wrote an opera about the twins. I haven’t heard that opera, but anyone interested in Salonen’s writing owes it to themselves to get to Walt Disney Concert Hall for one of these two performances.
Update: The LA Philharmonic is traveling to Costa Mesa for a performance of this same program at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon. For tickets go here.
For tickets on Friday go here.
For tickets on Saturday go here.
Sculpture of Castor and Pollux courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York