Esa-Pekka Salonen

Coronavirus has given the Finnish conductor plenty of time to think about the survival of classical music and the role of the orchestra in society, as Tom Service discovers

“ An orchestra should be a stimulator of intellectual discourse between people, an incubator of ideas”

Is there anything more melancholy than a conductor in lockdown? We often think of conductors as musical leaders, but lockdown revealed the real truth: they can’t lead without the entirety of musical culture around them. They’re dependent on musicians and audiences for their survival and their purpose in life.

When I spoke to the Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen at the end of May, he was exquisitely and painfully aware of this absence: ‘The last concert I conducted was in March, that Beethoven madness with the Philharmonia.’ On 15 March, he recreated the ‘total excess’ of Beethoven’s marathon December 1808 concert, with the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Fourth Piano Concerto.

Since the