Many conductors start out as other brands of musicians. It used to be that composer/conductors were common. There aren’t so many today. “Musicians who genuinely straddle that divide — whose talents and personal commitment are equally devoted to composing and conducting — have been the rare exceptions. Mahler was one, Leonard Bernstein another. Salonen is the pre-eminent case in our time. What it means, for him and for his audiences, is a constant, painful assessment of competing priorities. For a listener located outside Los Angeles, it’s hard to look at Salonen’s small catalog of compositions and not begrudge the time and artistic energy it takes to run the Philharmonic.”