How Green Was My Country Home

Not only is Finnish-born conductor-composer Esa-pekka Salonen the music world’s It Boy Of The Moment, conducting his farewell as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and his debut at the Metropolitan Opera to raves of ecstasy, he is also something of a maven of greenitudinousness. And it was as such, the L.A. Times reports, that he decided to have geothermal heating installed at his “country home on the Finnish coast . . . where he likes to compose and decompress.”

“A team of specialists came from Lapland and drilled four 400-foot holes and left,” he said. “But they also drilled through groundwater pockets and polluted the wells in the village. I started getting phone calls from my neighbors: ‘Look, we don’t want to disturb, but we can’t use our washing machine, and we are washing our shirts in Evian. Is there anything you can do?'”

Eventually, says the Times, without a hint of irony, “the problems were solved by his neighbors drilling new wells. And the geothermal design proved sound.”