Esa-Pekka Salonen returns to the Ojai Music Festival to serve as Music Director for the 80th Festival, June 11 to 14, 2026. Now in its 79th year, the Ojai Music Festival is a creative laboratory for thought-provoking musical experiences, bringing together innovative artists and curious audiences in an intimate, idyllic outdoor setting. Each Festival’s narrative is guided by a different Music Director, whose distinctive perspectives shape programming — ensuring energized festivals year after year.
“Esa-Pekka Salonen is one of the most inventive, adventurous thinkers of 21st-century musical life. The unique format of the Ojai Music Festival gives him an unusually free creative hand as both composer and conductor. I’m thrilled at the prospect of all that he will dream up,” said Artistic and Executive Director Ara Guzelimian.
Founded in 1947 by impresario John Bauer as a “Salzburg Festival of the West,” the Ojai Music Festival presents adventurous, open-minded, and open-hearted programming to audiences in an idyllic outdoor setting. From the start, Ojai—long a home to artists, writers, philosophers, and freethinkers of all stripes—presented an alluring getaway for top soloists, composers, and ad hoc ensembles of area musicians. As California’s classical and contemporary music community developed through the 20th century, so too did the participation of both California musicians and such ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, the New World Symphony and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The Ojai Music Festival’s reputation for musical excellence was cemented with the 1954 appointment of Lawrence Morton as Artistic Director. Morton, whose Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles had created a lively community dedicated to new music, unveiled a new model: one in which a new Music Director is engaged each year to curate the Festival. This groundbreaking idea has become central to the ethos of the Ojai Music Festival, fostering vitality and diversity of programming for the past 80 years.
Esa-Pekka Salonen previously appeared as Music Director of the Ojai Music Festival in 1999 and 2001, during former LA Phil Executive Director Ernest Fleischmann’s tenure as Artistic Director. In reprising his role in 2026, he joins a long line of composers and conductors who have held multiple residencies at the festivals, including Igor Stravinsky (1955 and 1956), Aaron Copland (1957, 1958, and 1976), Lukas Foss (six times between 1961 and 1987), Pierre Boulez (seven times between 1967 and 2003), Michael Tilson Thomas (seven times between 1968 and 1994), Kent Nagano (1985, 1986, 1995, and 2004), John Adams (1993 and 2021), and Mitsuko Uchida (1998 and 2024). Salonen’s works have also been programmed on numerous occasions in festival history. Among them are Fog and Objets Trouvés, in 2021, and “Elegy” from kínēma, in 2024. As a composer, he finds himself in the company of resident composers including Peter Maxwell Davies, Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, Magnus Lindberg, György Kurtág, Kaija Saariaho, and Thomas Adès.
Salonen’s Ojai position builds on his many longstanding ties to the state of California. As Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he oversaw the design, construction, and opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall, commissioned numerous new works from contemporary composers, and worked together with Executive Director Ernest Fleischmann and, later, CEO Deborah Borda to continue the LA Phil’s transformation from a provincial institution into a contender for the most forward-thinking and well-attended American orchestra. During this time, Salonen’s compositional practice also took a significant turn. Feeding off of the spirit of creativity and freedom he felt in Los Angeles, and California as a whole, Salonen shed the remaining trappings of his 20th-century Modernist musical upbringing toward a more intuitive, yet still cerebral style.
In 2020, Salonen assumed the role of Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. In this position—which he holds through the end of this season—Salonen has established an unprecedented leadership model in which he is advised by eight Collaborative Partners, co-founded the statewide California Festival with Gustavo Dudamel and Rafael Payare, led a synesthetic production of Scriabin’s Prometheus: the Poem of Fire in collaboration with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Cartier’s head perfumer Mathilde Laurent—recently made the subject of a documentary produced by Cartier in partnership with Mezzo TV—and has produced numerous recordings, including the GRAMMY® Award-winning world premiere recording of Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater (Best Opera Recording).
Esa-Pekka Salonen is known as both a composer and conductor. He is the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and Conductor Laureate of the Philharmonia Orchestra, where he was Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor from 2008 to 2021. He is also Conductor Laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 to 2009, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he was Chief Conductor from 1985 to 1995. 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 and has been endowed in perpetuity by the Negaunee Foundation. Salonen co-founded, and from 2003 to 2018 served as the Artistic Director of, the annual Baltic Sea Festival.
In recent seasons, Salonen has conducted the 2023 Nobel Prize Concert with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, won the prestigious Polar Music Prize, and led many projects with major orchestras and institutions. Among them are the Berlin Philharmonic, where he was composer-in-residence for the 2022–23 season, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, where he spent two seasons in residence as both a composer and conductor, and the Orchestre de Paris, he led a major staged production of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” with Romeo Castellucci during the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; this production was revived at the Grande Halle de Villette in November.
Earlier this season, Salonen notably led the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a newly-reconstructed version of Modest Mussorgsky’s unfinished final opera, Khovanshchina, with Simon and Gerard McBurney at the Helsinki and Baltic Sea festivals. Featuring never-before-heard music from a recently-discovered manuscript of Mussorgsky’s, and uniting Shostakovich’s instrumentation with Stravinsky and Ravel’s ending, this collaborative project will be reprised at the 2025 Salzburg Easter Festival this April.
The coming months will also see Salonen lead programs dedicated to Pierre Boulez at the Orchestre de Paris and Los Angeles Philharmonic, both with new choreography by Benjamin Millepied performed by LA Dance Project. Next season, Salonen will premiere his new Horn Concerto, commissioned by the Lucerne Festival, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Finnland-Institut, and Berliner Festspiele / Musikfest Berlin.
Salonen is as well-known for his compositions as he is for his work as a conductor. Major compositions include concertos for piano (composed for Yefim Bronfman), violin (for Leila Josefowicz, featured in an ad campaign for the Apple iPad), and cello (for Yo-Yo Ma), all of which appear on recordings conducted by Salonen himself; the LA Phil commissions Fog, dedicated to Frank Gehry, Gemini, premiered in 2019, and Tiu, premiered in 2024 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Walt Disney Concert Hall’s opening; Karawane, a work for voice and orchestra after a poem by Dadaist writer Hugo Ball, premiered at the Tonhalle Zürich and, later, the subject of an installation by the Barbican Centre; and his 2023 Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra, composed for organists Iveta Apkalna and Olivier Latry.
Salonen is also known for his enthusiasm for cutting-edge technology and multimedia collaboration, notably including early forays into virtual reality and artificial intelligence. His digital projects featured prominently in his tenure with the Philharmonia Orchestra, including the traveling immersive audio-visual installations RE-RITE and Universe of Sound, virtual reality films of Sibelius and Beethoven’s fifth symphonies and Mahler’s third, and an app for iPad that has sold tens of thousands of copies and was the subject of an Apple ad. In 2020, Salonen and the Finnish National Opera launched the Fedora Digital Prize-winning opera installation Laila, in which audience movement within the performance space—a 360º projection dome—actively alters the music and setting. Salonen has also spearheaded a number of digital projects with the San Francisco Symphony, including Throughline,premiered in 2020 as part of a digital event that launched his tenure as Music Director, and featuring a new composition by Nico Muhly featuring each member of the Collaborative Partners; LIGETI: PARADIGMS, a 35-minute exploration of three Ligeti pieces with visuals by media artist Refik Anadol and Collaborative Partner Carol Reiley; and a digital production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale directed by Netia Jones.
Photo: Benjamin Suomela