Salonen, Sellars and love of a challenge
Artistic team going back three decades can make difficult music sound easy
The thing about the American stage director Peter Sellars is that he can talk you into just about anything.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, now the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, discovered that during their first collaboration, the 1992 revival of Olivier Messiaen’s massive six-hour opera “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival.
That opera, which later had its 2002 North American premiere at the San Francisco Opera, is a dramatically static work arranged in tableaux like those of a medieval fresco. Salonen, looking over the score just nine years after its first performance, felt his heart sink.
“The score was like, I don’t know, 2,000 pages long,” he recalled, “and at about page 1,500 I thought, ‘This is never going to work. It’s going to be a disaster.’ I called Peter and he said, ‘Come have lunch and we’ll talk it over.’ ”
So Salonen, who was just about to begin his tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, hopped a plane from Helsinki to L.A. for a quick lunch. Then Sellars worked his rhetorical sorcery.
“During that lunch he managed to convince me, not only that it was going to work, but that it’s the best piece ever in the operatic repertoire. I felt it was going to be magical, and that I was really privileged to work with this amazing material,” Salonen said. “That’s Peter. He has that power of persuasion.”
The partnership between the two artists has flourished over countless projects in the intervening years. And now that Salonen is ensconced as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, he has found new avenues for them to work together.
Beginning with this week’s staged double bill of Igor Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” and “Symphony of Psalms,” Sellars and Salonen plan to collaborate on a series of four annual theatrical productions in Davies Symphony Hall. It’s an eclectic lineup, including a revival of Kaija Saariaho’s 2006 opera “Adriana Mater,” Messiaen’s choral work “La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur JésusChrist,” and Leos Janácek’s woodland opera “The Cunning Little Vixen.”
Is there a thematic through-line?
Not at all. It’s just pieces the two of them have been wanting to revive or tackle for the first time.
“What’s so beautiful about classical music now is that we don’t have to say it’s a single line,” Sellars told The Chronicle during a typically vivacious interview in Salonen’s Davies Hall office. “We can do Igor, we can do Kaija, we can do Messiaen and Janácek, because they’re all there. They’re all possibilities.
“The classical music world was never one world — get over it! It’s worlds within worlds.”
Stravinsky, though, is uppermost on both men’s minds as they gear up for opening night Friday, June 10, with a starry cast that includes tenor Sean Panikkar as Oedipus, mezzosoprano J’Nai Bridges as Jocasta and bass-baritone Willard White in three key supporting roles.
Combining the two pieces — the stately “Oedipus Rex,” which the composer billed as an “opera-oratorio,” and the choral and orchestral “Symphony of Psalms,” which is not typically regarded as a theatrical piece at all — is an idea dating back to at least 2009, when it was created as the final program for Salonen’s Los Angeles tenure.
But Sellars, the former wunderkind whose best-known work here has been as the director and librettist for the operas of Berkeley composer John Adams, said he’s been thinking about this material for decades.
“Stravinsky’s like Bach. You don’t run out of detail. You don’t run out of stuff that never occurred to you before, suddenly appearing right in front of you,” he explained. “Just yesterday, in rehearsal, we had revelations about ‘Oedipus’ that left me stunned — and I’ve worked on this piece for 30 years.”
And with that, Sellars is off on a manic lecture, riffing wildly and eloquently on the biographical, spiritual and dramatic roots of the two works.
“‘Oedipus’ is super-autobiographical for Igor because all his life, he had to be the brightest, the most brilliant, the greatest living composer. So all the Oedipus stuff — I’m the great solver of riddles, I’m the great intellectual hero, I’m the visionary of the future — that all resonates for him,” Sellars continued. “But you have to kill your father to get there.”
Here Sellars is referencing the period in the 1920s when Stravinsky, as an exile in Paris, began to systematically falsify his own artistic history to erase any trace of his Russian past. That project continued through most of the composer’s life, particularly in the series of published interviews (the so-called “conversation books”) that he produced with the American writer and conductor Robert Craft.
For Sellars, piercing the mythology of those interviews has been a kind of Oedipal journey of his own.
“I grew up worshiping Stravinsky, and I grew up believing those damn conversation books were true. And