Esa-Pekka Salonen

Orchestral textures are clean yet sensuous, rhythms exactingly precise...In lesser hands, the score can seem episodic. Salonen, however, forges it into a unified drama, in which not a note or... — Gramophone Magazine, October 2018More…

Davidsen is no ordinary singer. Throughout the whole album one marvels at the voice, its easy grandeur and sheer size, its steely focus and security… The timbre has a default cool beauty but... — Gramophone Magazine, June 2019More…

It ’s plain that The only one is among the final works of this brilliantly influential composer. There’s no sense of waning powers nor any loss of iconoclastic spirit in its unnervingly surreal... — BBC Music Magazine, April 2021, 4 out of 5 starsMore…

Herlitzius as the vengeful daughter is vocally tireless...Chereau exacts similarity intense, realistic performance from Adrianne Pieczonka as Chrysothemis...Other crucial elements in a total... — BBC Music Magazine, September 2014, 5 out of 5 starsMore…

it is very good to have Salonen's version of the Second Symphony restored to the catalogue; he captures its elusive qualities, and the LA strings sound at their most potent here in the surging... — BBC Music Magazine, June 2013, 4 out of 5 starsMore…

Here is an oeuvre, not only of precise, masterly workmanship, but infused with emotional warmth and, beyond that, with profound passions, evidenced not least in Dutilleux's sympathy for the... — BBC Music Magazine, May 2013, 5 out of 5 starsMore…

Saariaho puts text first and the singers respond, but articulation from the San Francisco Symphony, which has to muster such depths from rumbling percussion to solos from E flat clarinet and... — Gramophone Magazine, August 2025More…