MEMORIA for Wind Quintet by ESA-PEKKA SALONEN (Finland, 1958)

[#302] May 5, 2025 2003 | Grade 5 | 10’ – 15’ | Chamber Winds

Premiered by Avanti! Chamber Ensemble

on Nov 30, 2003 in Helsinki Finland

Purchase at Chester

Memoria, for Wind Quintet by Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is our Composition of the Week.

Memoria was written in 2003, to the 20th anniversary of the Ensemble Avanti!. It was premiered the same year, on November 30, at the Helsinki Conservatory in Finland by members of the ensemble.

“This 12-minute piece for woodwind quintet was composed as a gift for the 20th anniversary of the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra and premiered in November 2003 at the Helsinki Conservatory on a concert that also included Berio's Laborintus II, another work that deals with memory. Salonen was one of the founders of Avanti!, and he turned to material that had been percolating in his memory for the course of the ensemble's history (the score is dated "Helsinki 1982 - Los Angeles 2003"). Salonen took ideas from his early Mimo (a piece not included on his current list of works) and completely recomposed them into a new work that shares some of the sound world of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments. From a slow, heterophonic murmuring from alto flute and horn, the work expands into a brilliant divertimento full of rhythmic and metrical play. Game over, Memoria ends in memory of Berio with a homophonic chorale featuring the darker grain of alto flute, English horn, and contrabassoon.”

Program Notes by John Henken

Los Angeles Philharmonic Association's Director of Publications.

“Memoria, a wind quintet in one movement, harks back to a piece of mine from the early 1980s, Mimo, which I had left unfinished. In the summer of 2003, I wanted to write some chamber music before embarking on a complex and large-scale orchestral project. I found the manuscript of Mimo, over twenty years old, in my archives, and decided to finish the composition. In the end there was almost nothing left of the old quintet: maybe some kind of a ritualistic atmosphere and some textural aspects, very little else. I rewrote every note. The fast music that gradually grows out of the slow material did not exist in Mimo at all. The basic character is serious, sometimes even sad, despite the short fast sections where the playful, flickering divertimento character (typical of the ensemble) flashes by. The title Memoria refers to two things: partly to some sweet-and-sour memories from more than twenty years ago, and partly to the death of Luciano Berio, the great Italian composer, whose music I greatly admire. The chorale at the end is a lament to the memory of Berio, as a gesture a bit like the end of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments where Stravinsky mourns the death of his friend Debussy. For some reason, those chords in the last minute-and-a-half of Memoria have found their way into other works of mine. Some processes seem to need time. Program Note by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Memoria has been released by Chester Music.

“Esa-Pekka Salonen is known as both a composer and conductor. He is the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and Conductor Laureate for the Philharmonia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. As a member of the faculty of Los Angeles’s Colburn School, he develops, leads, and directs the pre-professional Negaunee Conducting Program, which also houses his score collection. Salonen co-founded, and from 2003 until 2018 served as the Artistic Director of, the annual Baltic Sea Festival.

Salonen defined his tenure at the San Francisco Symphony with an impulse to expand and embrace the possibilities of the orchestra. In addition to an unprecedented leadership model joined by eight Collaborative Partners—whose diversity of expertise reflects the scope of experience he envisions as the future of classical music and its audience—Salonen established the California Festival, a two-week, inter-institutional statewide celebration which he conceived alongside Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare; and led a series of collaborations across disciplines and practices which united the musicians and administration into a singular engine dedicated to engaging classical music in novel ways.

This season, Salonen leads the San Francisco Symphony in world premieres of works by Nico Muhly, Xavier Muzik, and Gabriella Smith, among many other programs. He also returns to the Philharmonia Orchestra—both in London and on tour in Italy—and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he leads wide-ranging programs including Bryce Dessner’s Violin Concerto with Pekka Kuusisto and Boulez’s Notations with Pierre-Laurent Aimard. With the Orchestre de Paris, Salonen conducts a reprise of his and Romeo Castellucci’s staged production of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” and a Boulez Centennial celebration with choreography by Benjamin Millepied, while a Salzburg Easter Festival residency with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra centers on a new Simon McBurney production of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina.

Salonen’s compositions are programmed with thirteen different orchestras this season. He conducts his own Tiu, kínēma, and cello concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra; he also conducts the cello concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony. With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he leads his Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra. His works, led by other conductors, also appear on programs at the Montreal and Aarhus symphony orchestras (Sinfonia concertante), Munich Philharmonic (Insomnia), Lahti Symphony Orchestra (kínēma), Netherlands Radio and Magdeburg philharmonic orchestras (Gemini), Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestra (Nyx), Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra (Cello Concerto), and Ensemble Intercontemporain (Meeting).

Esa-Pekka Salonen has an extensive and varied recording career, both as a conductor and composer. With the San Francisco Symphony, he has released recordings of Bartók’s three piano concertos with Pierre-Laurent Aimard on Pentatone, as well as spatial audio recordings of Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds, Lux Aeterna, and Ramifications on Apple Music Classical and the world premiere recording of Saariaho’s Adriana Mater on Deutsche Grammophon. Other recent recordings include Strauss’s Four Last Songs, recorded with Lise Davidsen and the Philharmonia Orchestra; Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin and Dance Suite, also with the Philharmonia; Stravinsky’s Perséphone, featuring Andrew Staples, Pauline Cheviller, and the Finnish National Opera, and a 2018 box set of his complete Sony recordings. His compositions appear on releases from Sony and Deutsche Grammophon, among others; his Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman), Violin Concerto (with Leila Josefowicz), and Cello Concerto (with Yo-Yo Ma) all appear on recordings conducted by Salonen himself.

Salonen is the recipient of many major awards, including the UNESCO Rostrum Prize for his work Floof in 1992, and the Siena Prize, given by the Accademia Chigiana, in 1993; he is the first conductor to receive it. In 1995 he received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Opera Award and two years later, its Conductor Award. Salonen was awarded the Litteris et Artibus medal, one of Sweden’s highest honors, by the King of Sweden in 1996. In addition to receiving both the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland and the Helsinki Medal, he was named Commander, First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland by the President of Finland. Musical America named him its Musician of the Year in 2006, and he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. His Violin Concerto won the 2012 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. He was the recipient of the 2014 Nemmers Composition Prize, which included a residency at the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University and performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Also in 2014, he was awarded the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture by Poland’s Minister of Culture. In 2020, he was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II. Previously an “Officier des Arts et des Lettres”, Salonen was awarded the rank of Commandeur by the French government in 2024. In 2024 he received the Polar Music Prize. To date, he has received seven honorary doctorates in four different countries.”

From the composer’s Website