“For anyone who has endured clichéd, condescending, uncomprehending, or otherwise aggravating depictions of classical music in American TV ads—the snobs at the symphony, the sopranos screaming under Valkyrie helmets, the badly edited bowdlerizations of the ‘Ode to Joy’—a new ad for the Apple iPad featuring the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen may come as a pleasant shock,” writes Alex Ross in Monday’s (5/26) New Yorker. “Salonen is shown receiving inspiration for a passage in his Violin Concerto and trying it out in his iPad; then, after a montage of scenes in London and Finland, we see the violinist Leila Josefowicz and the Philharmonia Orchestra, of London, digging into the score.… Most unusually, it celebrates a contemporary classical piece; Salonen’s concerto had its première at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009…. In less than a day, the ad racked up a hundred thousand views on YouTube…. One can’t help thinking of the hundreds of gifted composers who are not so fortunate—there is no job as solitary and invisible as writing music for a living.… But I imagine that many composers will be pleased at the sight of Salonen’s mass-market breakthrough. Very simply, it says: We exist.”
Posted May 29, 2014
