Horn Concerto
Esa-Pekka Salonen was born in Helsinki on June 30, 1958, and now lives primarily in Los Angeles. He wrote his Horn Concerto for Berlin Philharmonic Principal Horn Stefan Dohr at the suggestion of Michael Haefliger, director of the Lucerne Festival. The piece was co-commissioned by the Lucerne Festival, Finnland-Institut and Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, and Fondazione Teatro alla Scala. The first performance was given on August 20, 2025, at the Lucerne Festival by Orchestre de Paris with horn soloist Stefan Dohr, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. First BSO performances (and the American premiere): February 12-14, 2026, Stefan Dohr, soloist, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting.
In addition to the solo horn, the score of the Horn Concerto calls for 2 flutes (both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, percussion (2 players: I. glockenspiel, vibraphone, congas, bass drum; II. 2 bongos, 2 tom-toms, bass drum), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
One of few composer-conductors in recent generations to have achieved notable success in both of these aspects of his musical life, Esa-Pekka Salonen owns the distinction of having been music director of two major American orchestras, leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1992 until 2009 and the San Francisco Symphony from 2020 to 2025. He recently returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the role of creative director.
Salonen originally entered the Sibelius Academy in his native Finland as a horn player and composer, studying with the great symphonist and opera composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. Later he worked with the modernist Italians Franco Donatoni and Niccolò Castiglioni and the Slovenian experimentalist Vinko Globokar. His study as a conductor with the famed Jorma Panula often cast him in the practical role of leading the performances when he and others of his colleagues began to organize concerts of their own. He was one of a remarkable group of Finnish musicians at the Academy in those years, many of whom have gone on to major success, including the composers Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg, the cellist Anssi Karttunen, and the conductors Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Osmo Vänskä. Salonen and many of his colleagues sought to stretch the bounds of conservative Finnish musical culture, founding such groups as “Ears Open!”, the Toimii Ensemble, and later the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra. The guiding principle of the Toimii Ensemble was to explore collective experimental music in the vein of Cornelius Cardew and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Vestiges of this maverick history still add spice and interest to the far more refined and craft-oriented approach of Toimii’s composer-members’ mature works.
By the late 1970s Salonen was becoming known as a conductor. He impressed in his debut with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and in 1983 made his debut with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London on short notice in an acclaimed performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. The following year he debuted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 26. Having appeared with the orchestra as a guest conductor annually, he succeeded André Previn as the Philharmonic’s music director in 1992. Salonen’s tenure helped transform the ensemble, already a very good one, to its status as one of the major cultural institutions in the world. He has won praise for his approach to programming in Los Angeles and elsewhere, not only for his openness to new repertoire but also to new presentation technologies and educational opportunities. Salonen remains an energetic advocate for the work of other living composers. This summer at Tanglewood, Salonen directs the Tanglewood Music Center’s annual Festival of Contemporary Music, curating the festival as well as leading the TMC Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a wide-ranging series of programs. Salonen first led the BSO at Tanglewood in 1985. He appeared with the orchestra at Symphony Hall in 1988, and most recently conducted his own Violin Concerto with soloist Leila Josefowicz here in 2012. His music has been performed frequently at Tanglewood.
Following his appointment in Los Angeles, due to administrative and artistic demands, Salonen experienced years of fallow production, writing almost nothing between 1992 and 1996. He also experienced a stylistic epiphany during which he began to embrace aspects of new music (including that of the Californian John Adams) that conflicted with the bracing modernism in which he was originally trained. The realignment of Salonen’s compositional philosophies was evident in his “return” to composition in 1996 with his exuberant, colorful, and generous concerto-for-orchestra-like LA Variations, written for and very much indebted to his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Beginning in the late 1990s Salonen the composer worked hard to regain equilibrium, even to the point of taking a season-long sabbatical from the Philharmonic in 2000 to concentrate on composing, triggered by a major commission from the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
Since about 2002 Salonen has assembled an impressively substantial body of work, mostly orchestral pieces with or without soloist, and major ensembles and festivals have responded enthusiastically with new commissions. His Wing on Wing (2004) was commissioned to celebrate the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new home, the distinctively styled, Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall for the construction of which Salonen was a highly effective advocate. Major works include his Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra, a cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma, a violin concerto for Leila Josefowicz, and a piano concerto for Yefim Bronfman, as well as the chorus-and-orchestra work Karawane. In 2020, in keeping with his history of experimentation, he created Laila with Ekho Collective as an audience-participation immersive installation work for the Finnish National Opera. Commissions have come from most of the major orchestras and orchestral institutions of the world, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BSO, New York Philharmonic, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and Berlin Philharmonic. In 2024 his accomplishments were acknowledged with the Polar Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in music.
Each Salonen piece is different, but a very refined and exact sense of orchestral color and a delight in rhythmic propulsion and pattern are characteristic of many of his works. In his Horn Concerto, he takes advantage of his deep familiarity with the solo instrument to draw contrasts among its many personalities, which can range from full, Romantic, and lyrical to punchy and edgy, heroic to otherworldly. He calls for the soloist to play without valves in its first entrance; the natural horn, without deliberate adjustment to pitch, follows a natural harmonic scale turned differently versus the rest of the orchestra, more evident as the pitch rises. Listen also for the soloist singing and playing at the same time and quick shifts between the pinched-sounding “stopped” and “open” tone that are part of every hornist’s toolkit. Salonen folds in his experience as a conductor by referencing a range of other horn-focused pieces and moments from a broad repertoire. In his own comments on his piece, he notes Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 2 and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, which opens with solo horn, and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony No. 3, which features a famous horn chorale in the third movement; Strauss’s Heldenleben pops up in the concerto’s finale, just after the start of the 12/8 section, and there are other horn phantoms, real or imagined, populating this multilayered and substantial concerto.
The composer’s comments on his piece appear below.
Robert Kirzinger
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
Esa-Pekka Salonen on his Horn Concerto
The horn was my first love in the world of music. I was learning the trumpet when I was ten but was persuaded to change to the horn by a schoolmate a couple of classes above me. He mentioned the famous quote by Schumann: “the sound of the horn is the soul of the orchestra.” I didn’t have much of an idea of who Schumann was, but then my friend came up with even stronger argument. If I made it to the Orchestra A in my school (there were three levels), I could skip PE lessons for rehearsals. At that point I started to get seriously interested.
My school, the Helsinki Finnish Coeducational School had access to the top teachers in Finland, and I started my studies with Holger Fransman, the dean of Finnish horn players. He had studied in Vienna with Karl Stiegler in the late 1920s; his fellow student and roommate was Gottfried von Freiberg who would later become the principal horn of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and give the world premiere of the Second Horn Concerto by Richard Strauss. Holger was appointed by Robert Kajanus as the first Finnish-born musician to the Principal Horn position in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 1937.
It is not an exaggeration to say that meeting Holger Fransman changed my life. Suddenly I had a direction and an authority to guide me along the path. After the first year as his student, I understood that music is the only thing I wanted to pursue as a profession and career.
Many of my early attempts at composing were horn pieces. My first published work was Horn Music 1, which was also the score I showed to Einojuhani Rautavaara when I asked to become his student.
The idea of writing a Horn Concerto has been in my mind since those distant days. As is mostly the case, to make a project like that happen a confluence is needed: the right time and the right people. When Michael Haefliger of the Lucerne Festival got in touch in 2021 and asked if I could write a concerto for Stefan Dohr, I knew that this was the moment I had been waiting for. I have long been admiring Stefan’s artistry, both from the podium and in the audience, and I knew that his track record performing and commissioning new works for the instrument is second to none.
The actual composition process took 18 months, but some of the sketches are of much older material, ideas that finally found a home in this project. At first, I was trying to resist all the memories of the famous horn moments in the repertoire that seemed to invade my imagination, but finally decided to embrace them, and use them as material. In the Concerto those moments appear and disappear like fish coming to the surface to catch an insect before diving to the depths of the sea again. In some cases, I embedded a well-known piece into my own harmonic world, such as Mozart’s Second Horn Concerto in the first movement, or the opening solo of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony in the second movement. Mostly those flashbacks are just that: fleeting moments, almost too short to register.
The first movement starts with a motif, or theme (or Leitmotiv as in Wagner), that appears several times throughout the piece, here played on natural horn (not using the valves) against a synthetic overtone harmony. After a short interlude of descending string texture, a recitativo section begins: the solo horn in dialogue with the wind instruments. After a moment of the soloist simultaneously playing and singing the Leitmotiv, an accelerando section leads to faster music, my homage to Mozart (and his friend, horn player Ignaz Leutgeb, without whom the horn repertoire would be so much poorer). The music calms down gradually. At the end of the movement the theme is heard again, this time played by the piccolo and the English Horn.
The second movement is essentially an Adagio; slowly singing music that oscillates between calm and more agitated phases. The initial solo horn monologue against a heavily pulsing string accompaniment metamorphoses itself to a distant memory of the famous solo in the opening of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony (that was the symphony I conducted in my diploma concert at the ripe age of 21). The long horn line is interrupted by two suddenly more dramatic orchestral interludes before the movement ends with echoes of the Leitmotiv.
The third movement opens with music that is related to the end section of the first movement, this time a mirror image: a gradual process from calm to playful, sometimes feverish activity. A scherzando orchestral interlude in 12/8-meter leads to the main material of the movement, virtuosic horn solos accompanied by string rhythms from the previous interlude. The harmony is partly based on the “Mystic Chord” used already by Scriabin in Prometheus. The motif/theme returns against slowly microtonally sinking strings.
A playful solo section follows, where the unique hand-stopping technique of the horn is used to produce rapid changes of the tone color. The 12/8 music returns, this time the solo horn forms a trio with the orchestra horns. Flashbacks of Eroica. The Leitmotiv is heard again, played by tutti orchestra. The hand-stopping music returns with more active orchestral texture. A new, singing theme is introduced. Another orchestral interlude, accelerando to a very fast tempo.
Finally: a virtuosic coda where the horn is pushed to the very limits of what is physically possible. Somehow, when writing the final minutes of the Concerto, I was taken straight back to my childhood and teen years. Very powerful nostalgia, but not of the sad kind, more like a pleasant dream.
Esa-Pekka Salonen