Art & Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen is making a quiet provocation: classical music shouldn’t behave like museum glass. By naming The Rite of Spring and a Bruckner symphony, he picks two different kinds of “big” that audiences are trained to respect at a distance - Stravinsky’s riotous, percussive shock and Bruckner’s cathedral-scale, slow-burn grandeur. His point is that both are body music, not just mind music, and that the concert hall’s habits (polite stillness, reverent silence, the fetish of “perfect” sound) can anesthetize what these scores actually do.

“I want people to feel the music physically” is also a statement about power and risk. Conducting, in Salonen’s framing, isn’t merely curating balances; it’s engineering impact. The best performance leaves you with the aftereffects you associate with bass at a club, a film’s jump scare, a sermon that lands - breath altered, pulse changed, posture adjusted. That’s a modern, almost cinematic demand on an old format: don’t just interpret; deliver.

The subtext pushes back against the stereotype of classical as elite brainwork, where meaning is earned through education and score-study. Salonen, a composer-conductor shaped by late-20th-century modernism and amplified by contemporary recording culture, is arguing for immediacy: the audience doesn’t need permission to be moved. At the end of those pieces, he wants the room not to “understand” greatness, but to register it like weather - pressure, vibration, release.