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A few years ago, organists Iveta Apkalna and Olivier Latry each approached Esa-Pekka Salonen with a request for him to write an organ concerto. Instead of disappointing either musician, Salonen decided to write Sinfonia concertante for Organ and Orchestra, to be premiered by these two titans of the organ world.
The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, based in Katowice, performed the world premiere on Jan. 13, 2023, with Apkalna as soloist and conducted by Salonen in a concert celebrating the inauguration of a new organ for the Polish orchestra’s hall.
Additional performances by the Berlin Philharmonic on Jan. 19, 2023, and Orchestre de Paris on Jan. 25, 2023, were conducted by Salonen, featuring Olivier Latry. The work was commissioned by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic Foundation, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under Salonen, will perform the work with Iveta Apkalna, in concerts Jan. 30-Feb. 4.
In this program note, Salonen discusses the work’s origins and its process.
I started developing material for the Sinfonia concertante in the lockdown spring of 2020. It took me a while to get over the first, obvious hurdle — the organ can cover the entire scope of a symphony orchestra in every way. It has the same or wider pitch, dynamics and color ranges. How does one write a piece for essentially two orchestras without creating redundancy issues?
After a lot of thinking and at times agonizing, I had the Columbus’ egg moment: why not just write the music and orchestrate it for those two rich and complex instruments, the organ and the orchestra?
I decided to call the composition Sinfonia concertante instead of concerto, as the function of the organ keeps changing constantly over the 30-minute journey. Sometimes it plays alone, often as the soloist in the traditional sense, or as a chamber-music partner to wind instruments. A few times, it becomes part of the orchestra as a member of the collective in a supporting role. I cannot think of any other instrument with the same chameleon-like flexibility.
The long history of the organ inspired me to imagine “old” music from a hypothetical world, an alternate universe, still mine but slightly alien. I decided to use old forms, such as the slow, courtly pavane in the first movement.
There is only one actual quote in the Sinfonia concertante: the famous art antiqua, four-part Organa, Viderunt omnes by Pérotin (fl. c. 1200), which I re-harmonized and orchestrated for full orchestra and the solo organ. (I have been a Pérotin fan since my teen years.)
Esa-Pekka Salonen
