L.A.'s Fair-Haired Finn

Can Bruckner and Donald Duck coexist? Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen thinks so.

The scene was a hip little hair salon off Los Angeles' Melrose Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. A personable young man with Hollywood good looks and a funny foreign name was getting his wavy, dark-blond hair cut. The barber struck up a conversation. "So," she inquired, "what do you do?" He replied that he worked with the local symphony orchestra. "Wow!" she exclaimed. "What instrument do you play?" Actually, he said, he was the conductor -- had she ever attended a concert? "Of course not," she said, and went back to cutting his hair.

All right, so he's not yet a...

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