Saariaho reviews

The second volume of Meta4’s championing of Kaija Saariaho’s chamber works for strings presents, fascinatingly, a fine gossamer web of transformation and re-invention. Only Terra Memoria, Saariaho’s second string quartet, dating from 2006, stands alone in its original single form – and it’s not only the most substantial (nearly 20 minutes) work on the disc, but also the most robustly inventive.

As an admirer of Kaija Saariaho, I’d been saddened to be disappointed by her monodrama Emilie, at its staged premiere in Lyon in 2010. Here, the distillation of the work into a 25-minute concert suite, for ears alone, makes for a new and excitingly close focus both on the thoughts and feelings of its protagonist, the Marquise Emilie de Chatelet, scientist and mistress of Voltaire – and on the music’s unique and distinctive landscape, its coppery-harpsichord-tinted writing – now more economically written for small orchestra.

The famous and creatively fertile trio of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, librettist and poet Amin Maalouf, and the soprano Dawn Upshaw appears once again in this live recording from Saariaho’s 60th birthday concert at Helsinki’s new Music Centre in 2012. This is the composer’s oratorio, La Passion de Simone, a ‘musical path in 15 stations’ offering comments on, and quotations from, the life and works of the French-Jewish philosopher, pacifist and ascetic, Simone Weil, who died at the age of 34.

Messiaen and Saariaho may overlap little in terms of specific technique, but there is a clear artistic affinity in their music. In the words of Peter Sellars’s eloquent booklet essay, they share a ‘taste for the invisible and yearning for the transcendent’, making their pairing on this beautiful disc from pianist Gloria Cheng exceptionally rewarding.

A medieval tale of idealised love, beyond normal comprehension, and fulfilled only at the moment of death; not Wagner or Debussy, but Saariaho’s mesmerising first opera L’amour de loin.

Saariaho has always had an extraordinary ear for a beauty of sound, best described in terms of light. Since working with singers like Dawn Upshaw and Karita Mattila, her melodic contours have become less angular, more lyrical. The slow unfolding of the solo line in the first movement of Notes on Light – a five-movement cello concerto – has the simple inevitability you’d expect from that movement’s subtitle: ‘Translucent, secret’. Anssi Karttunen is as impressive in this as he is in the strongly rhythmic music which the work also contains.