Foreign Bodies


Foreign Bodies is an orchestral composition in three movements by the Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen. The work was commissioned by the Finnish Broadcasting Company and was first performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival on August 12, 2001 by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste.

Composition

Foreign Bodies has a duration of roughly 20 minutes and is composed in three movements:
  1. Body Language
  2. Language
  3. Dance

    Instrumentation

The work is scored for an orchestra comprising two piccolos, two flutes, three oboes, cor anglais, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, six horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, four percussionists, two harps, one keyboardist, and strings.

Reception

of The New Yorker described the composition as "music of muscular, extroverted energy." Stephen Johnson of BBC Music Magazine similarly lauded it as "strongly argued, bursting with energy and full of the kind of ravishing sound-vistas that makes one want to go back and indulge again and again." Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times praised Foreign Bodies for its "vivid application of orchestral color and the inner clockwork structure" and wrote:
Arnold Whittall of Gramophone was more critical of the work, however, writing: