GRAMMY Award-winner for Best Opera Recording, the late Kaija Saariaho's much-admired second opera, Adriana Mater, was recorded at Davies Symphony Hall in June 2023, just days after its composer's untimely passing. In its review, the New York Times wrote, "Saariaho's delicately consoling music stares down the worst of the world and says: the only way forward is grace." Featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen, Fleur Barron, Axelle Fanyo, Nicholas Phan, Christopher Purves, San Francisco Symphony & Chorus.

This live recording of Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony marks the birth on record of the ‘Sinfonia Grange au Lac’, an orchestra created in July 2018 on the occasion of the Rencontres Musicales d’Évian, the prestigious festival created by Mstislav Rostropovich in 1985 and revived since 2014. A musical ambassador intended to promote the excellence of its parent festival worldwide, the Sinfonia Grange au Lac consists of musicians from leading European orchestras (in Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, London, Lucerne, Munich, Paris, Salzburg, Valencia and Vienna) as well as existing groups such as the Trio Karénine and the Quatuor Ébène. And it was a stroke of genius to manage to secure the services of Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Nicolas Altstaedt presents here his version of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s monumental Cello Concerto, originally composed for Yo-Yo Ma, and given its Finnish premiere by the Franco-German cellist under the composer’s direction. In partnership with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, he reveals its full expressive dimension here: ‘The first movement opens with what, in my sketchbook, was called “Chaos to line”’, says Esa-Pekka Salonen. Chaos, a metaphorical comet, a rhythmic mantra with congas and bongos, a wild dance… Salonen goes on to say of the third movement: ‘I imagined the orchestra as some kind of gigantic lung, expanding and contracting first slowly, but accelerating to a point of mild hyperventilation which leads back to the dance-like material’.

Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard joins forces with the San Francisco Symphony and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen for a recording of Bartók’s complete piano concertos. A pianist himself, Bartók imbued his three concertos with multiple aspects of his compositional persona, ranging from complex and innovative (the First) to exuberant (the Second) and serene (the Third). The result is a fascinating slice of his musical life. This all-Bartók release marks the first Pentatone collaboration between Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony, an ensemble he has reshaped through creative performance concepts and expansive new media projects.

Signum s third disc with the Philharmonia Orchestra and their Principal Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is drawn again from their celebrated Vienna: City of Dreams series of 2008-9. The Ninth symphony is often interpreted as a farewell to the world, in part because Mahler never had the chance to hear it performed. As one critic wrote, If you want to learn to weep, you should listen to the first movement of the Ninth, the great, magnificent song of ultimate farewell . Other releases this year with the Philharmonia orchestra will include Mahler s Sixth Symphony with Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Mahler s Fourth Symphony with Sir Charles Mackerras.

Experience the timeless melodies of Mahler Symphony No 6 with this 2011 CD from Esa-Pekka Salonen. This classic album offers a beautiful collection of classical compositions that are perfect for any music lover.

At the occasion of the 70th birthday of Swedish contemporary composer Anders Hillborg, the award-winning conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra release an album with some of his most recognizable works. Together with violinist Eldbjorg Hemsing and soprano Hannah Holgersson they have recorded Hillborg's compositions: 'Liquid Marble', 'Kvall' and 'Violin Concerto No. 2'. Anders Hillborg has become one of the leading contemporary classical composers of our time with works commissioned and performed by Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall or Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. Notable musicians he's worked with include clarinetist Martin Frost, soprano Renee Fleming, violinist Lisa Batiashvili, violist Lawrence Power or such renown conductors as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Alan Gilbert, Gustavo Dudamel and David Zinman.

A selection of Richard Strauss’s most-loved lieder and songs, and Elisabeth’s arias from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, the role in which Lise Davidsen will make her debut at Bayreuth Festival. Plus Ariadne’s aria from Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos: her 2017 Glyndebourne debut in the title role was named “one of those ‘I was there’ moments” (The Times).
Also includes Strauss’s iconic Four Last Songs, originally premiered by Decca’s Kirsten Flagstad. Recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra, who performed the premiere of the Four Last Songs, and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Stravinsky’s Perséphone (1934) is a dynamic music-theatrical narration of the myth of Persephone’s abduction to the underworld and return to earth. The transparent, sober but evocative music epitomizes Stravinsky’s sensuous take on Neoclassicism, and the piece showcases Stravinsky’s eclectic, original and highly personal approach to music and musical drama through a playful mixture of several genres – melodrama, song, chorus, dance and pantomime. Ultimately, Perséphone offers Stravinsky’s second ode to spring, albeit without the brutal excesses of Le Sacre.

This is the recording of Bartók's piano concertos the world has been waiting for. Yefim Bronfman conquers not only the tremendous technical difficulties of the music, but also the widely varying moods, from the violence of the First Concerto through the otherworldly calm of the Third. Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic through the extremely difficult orchestral writing without a misstep, contributing his own powerful impulse to the music while seconding Bronfman's ideas. The recording is nearly ideal in its clarity, balance, and dynamics. It's hard to find a more satisfying CD of any music in the current catalogs.

Four premier recordings add up to a generous dose of Magnus Lindberg's orchestral mastery, served up in lovingly prepared, magnificently engineered performances by the composer's friend and longtime champion Esa-Pekka Salonen. Within just a few minutes into Cantigas, you're swept up by swirling pools of color chords, ticklish brass flurries both muted and open, and chattering, petulant rhythmic figures that bounce off a pliable canvas of dense sonorities.

Tellingly, classical albums whose liner notes are translated into Spanish–in addition to the traditional English, French, and German–tend to be those that contain music by Spanish-speaking composers and ensembles. This distinction goes to the heart of the "discovery" of the music of composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) during the mid-to-late 1990s, evidenced by a steady series of releases after decades of near silence. And silence does not suit Revueltas, who favored enthralling, brash, maximalist symphonic expression, and whose work will not sound entirely new to new audiences, even though his clout as a major cultural figure stops at the border of his native country, Mexico.

Last production staged by Patrice Chéreau, this Elektra will remain as the main and most striking lyrical event of these last years in Aix-en-Provence. This production is leaded by three amazing singers: the German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius gave a tremendous, never-to-be-forgotten account of the title role, Waltraud Meier portrays a human and chilling Clytemnestra and Adrianne Pieczonka is a fantastic Chrysothemis. Everyone's loneliness and intimate struggles are Patrice Chéreau's favorites theatrical themes. With Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Orchestre de Paris, this production of Elektra becomes an unforgettable experience.

The work was premiered on May 29, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, as a staged production of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with Pierre Monteux conducting. Monteux also led the first SFS performances of the original 1913 version in February 1939. Over the years the score has appeared in various revisions. This performance uses the edition marked “Revised 1947; New edition 1967,” brought out by Boosey & Hawkes, which had just acquired the work’s copyright.

This sensational disc has served as a reference edition for both concertos since it was first issued back in the late 1980s. The Sibelius concerto is distinguished by the tension between Lin’s passionate and virtuosic account of the solo part and Salonen’s remarkable precision at the head of the orchestra. Listen, for example, to the remarkable rhythmic clarity at the opening of the finale, and to the way this serves to “float” Lin’s daredevil pyrotechnics up above. It’s just marvellous. The same holds true of the Nielsen–there is no finer account of this neglected concerto. It’s a rarity because in the finale Nielsen subordinates flash and dazzle to the work’s overall emotional arc, progressing from anger to contentment. That doesn’t mean the music isn’t excellent, or that Lin and Salonen’s performances aren’t gripping from first note to last. They tear into the opening movement with apt ferocity and find the necessary emotional resolution in the work’s amiable conclusion. The detailed, well-balanced sound ideally suits the interpretations. Essential.