Esa-Pekka Salonen. Photo source: IMG Artists/Audoin Desforges/Philharmonie de Paris.
In Monday’s (2/2) San Francisco Chronicle, Aidin Vaziri writes, “Esa-Pekka Salonen, who left the San Francisco Symphony in 2025, will lead the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood contemporary music festival in 2026. The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced Monday, Feb. 2, that the Finnish conductor and composer will serve as director of the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music in 2026, curating five programs July 23-27. The appointment places Salonen in charge of one of the country’s most visible showcases for new classical music and reinforces his post-San Francisco pivot toward flexible, project-based leadership rather than a traditional music directorship…. Salonen’s Tanglewood programming spans multiple generations, pairing memorial works by recently deceased composers with music by millennial and Gen Z artists, while drawing connections between contemporary scores and older musical traditions. The festival closes with a Nordic-themed program featuring works by Hans Abrahamsen, Anders Hillborg and Magnus Lindberg, alongside Salonen’s own Cello Concerto…. Salonen will also lead two Boston Symphony concerts at Tanglewood … Since stepping down last summer as music director of the San Francisco Symphony … he has since been named creative director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, effective in the 2026-27 season, as well as creativity and innovation chair of the Philharmonie de Paris and principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris beginning in 2027-28.”
