Gambit
Composition and premiere: Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote Gambit in 1998 as a birthday tribute for his longtime friend and fellow composer, Magnus Lindberg. Salonen led the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in the premiere on June 6, 1998. First BSO and Tanglewood performance: July 26, 2026, Andris Nelsons conducting.
From Gustav Mahler to Leonard Bernstein, composers who have excelled as conductors have long found the two sides of their creative lives mutually reinforcing, their podium experiences coloring the choices they make when writing their own music. Yet even among such distinguished composer-conductors, Esa-Pekka Salonen is a special case: his trajectory as a composer was radically transformed by his decision to take up a podium career. Salonen began conducting in the late 1970s to support his composing, supposing that the ability to direct his own pieces would lead to performance opportunities and finding also that conducting provided a measure of financial stability that composing did not. It came as no small irony when he emerged in the mid-1980s as one of the leading conductors of his generation and developed a reputation for incisive, enterprising interpretations of 20th and 21st-century repertoire. Even when his busy conducting schedule left him without the time to write new music, though, Salonen never stopped thinking of himself as a composer first.
Drawing much of his inspiration from continental models, Salonen began his compositional career very much the confirmed modernist. To a degree, this was a function of the overwhelming influence that Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) exerted on Finnish cultural life in the years when Salonen was growing up. Characteristic of young Finnish composers of his generation, Salonen’s reaction to this situation was to circumvent Sibelius’s gravitational pull altogether. After completing his training at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, he traveled to Italy, where he studied with the independent-minded Franco Donatoni and Niccolò Castiglioni. Their music’s whimsy, mischief, and lightness of touch was worlds away from the emphasis on process and organic continuity long typical in Finnish composition. Related motivations were behind Salonen’s involvement with Korvat auki (“Ears Open!”) and Toimii (“It Works”), co-founded with his close friend, the composer Magnus Lindberg and other colleagues. Both organizations were devoted to proselytizing and performing the new, the cutting-edge, and the non-orthodox in Finnish composition and improvisation.
By Salonen’s admission, the turning point in his creative life was his stint as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which began in 1992. Though Salonen would be hailed over the course of his 17-year tenure for transforming the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the world’s most progressive orchestras, the organization changed him at least as much as he changed it. In a 2002 interview, he credited southern California for its aesthetic “openness” and “pioneering spirit” — for having a lack of “established ideas as to what art should be” — which he found empowering as a tradition-conscious European. Particularly decisive was the influence of U.S. composers like John Adams, whose music Salonen championed during his Los Angeles years. Salonen recalls how his modernist training had led him to internalize a set of aesthetic prohibitions — to avoid melody, pulsation, and even tonal centers at all costs. But Adams’s propulsive postminimalism breathed fresh life into exactly those tabooed musical parameters, and performing his scores gave Salonen permission, as it were, to let go of lingering anxieties regarding his compositional language.
Embracing what he dubbed a musical “pleasure principle,” Salonen began to hone his mature voice with LA Variations (1996), written for his orchestra following an extended bout of compositional silence. A fantastically colorful, sometimes boisterous showpiece, LA Variations laid the ground for a recalibration in Salonen’s priorities that led him to set aside more and more time for composition. In the three decades since, Salonen has assembled a broad catalog of prismatic, event-filled orchestra pieces, vocal scores, and concertos, including his Cello Concerto, to be performed tomorrow evening on Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music orchestral concert, and his recent Horn Concerto, which he led with the Boston Symphony Orchestra this past February.
Composed not long after LA Variations, the festive, virtuosic curtain-raiser Gambit pays tribute to one of the most important relationships in Salonen’s life, his friendship with Lindberg. Salonen and Lindberg were born three days apart in June 1958. They took classes together at the Sibelius Academy and studied with many of the same composition teachers, including Donatoni. They remain close friends and confidants, advising one another on works in progress. (Salonen dubs his friend “Doctor Lindberg,” referring to Lindberg’s knack for diagnosing compositional problems.) In advance of their respective fortieth birthdays in June 1998, Salonen and Lindberg decided to write musical gifts for one another. Gambit, Salonen’s present to Lindberg, unabashedly embodies his “pleasure principle.” It opens with a nod at Lindberg’s music, with quietly oscillating clarinet and congas ringed by a series of slow-moving, richly resonant string chords. Salonen describes these bars as a freely recomposed “aural memory” of Lindberg’s early piece for two pianos, Play I, from 1979, when both men were still students. Given that Lindberg and Salonen’s birthdays fall just a few days after the summer solstice, it is also possible to hear in these luminescent, half-lit pages something of the otherworldly ambiance of the Finnish midnight sun.
Salonen’s title speaks to Gambit’s expressive aims. Although the term “gambit” is now used to refer to any kind of calculated trick or maneuver, its original meaning came from chess, where it denoted the act of placing a piece in danger — potentially sacrificing it — to acquire a strategic advantage. According to Salonen, Gambit was constructed using a very small number of “gestures” or musical “archetypes,” that “do not change much, only the environment in which they appear.” Instead of evolving or acquiring new capabilities, Salonen’s gestures and archetypes are constantly being reconfigured and placed in new scenarios, like pieces on a chessboard. The conceit is another nod at Lindberg’s Play I, in which the performers followed a series of rules rather akin to those in a chess game.
Gambit’s most important archetypes, introduced after the luminescent opening pages, are two: a tumbling string-led figure and a rhythmic tattoo for wooden percussion that later migrates to the high woodwinds and mallet instruments. Salonen subjects these materials to a series of brassy, hyperactive permutations that suggest an awareness that “gambit” and “gambol,” for playful frolics, are etymologically related. If the opening bars breathe the atmosphere of the June solstice, then maybe Gambit’s gamboling main section conjures Finnish midsummer, the holiday of bonfires and barbecues that marks the solstice. But since all holidays must come to an end, Gambit concludes by breaking the spell — with a crash of metallic percussion and a brief return to the initial aural memory.
Matthew Mendez
Matthew Mendez is a San Francisco-based musicologist and critic who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He received a Ph.D. in music history from Yale University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University. Mr. Mendez was the recipient of a 2016 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding music journalism.