The Program
KAIJA
SAARIAHO
About the
Composer
Kaija
Saariaho received her early musical training in Finland, attending the Sibelius
Academy, where she first studied with Paavo Heininen. Her studies continued in Germany with Brian Ferneyhough and
Klaus Huber. In 1982, Saariaho went to Paris to study advanced computer music
techniques at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique
(Ircam), the major European center for electronic music led by Pierre Boulez. Saariaho has since
resided in Paris and continues her
relationship with Ircam.
Over the course of her career, Saariaho has won a wide array of
important prizes in composition, including the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis
(1982), the Prix Ars Electronica (1989), the Elise Stoeger Prize (1999), the
Grawemeyer Award (2003), the Wihuri Sibelius Prize (2007), the Michael Ludwig
Nemmers Prize (2009), and the Léonie Sonning Music Prize (2011).
Saariaho’s music spans almost every genre. Her chamber works include two string
quartets—Nymphéa (1987) and Terra Memoria (2006)—and several works
for voice or solo instrument and electronics, including Lonh (voice, 1996) and NoaNoa
(flute, 1992). Large orchestral pieces include the paired works Du cristal … à la fumée (1989 and 1990, respectively). In the last several years,
Saariaho has been particularly involved in the composition of music theater
works, starting with her first opera L’amour
de loin (2000), and then continuing with Adriana Mater (2005), La
Passion de Simone (2006), and Émilie (2008).
Écho!
Saariaho’s
music transports listeners into a sound world of rich and subtly shaded tone
colors and harmonies that shape musical experience into passages of flowing
rhythms. Listeners who attend to the subtle shadings of vocal production and
its interaction with electronics will be richly rewarded.
Commissioned by the Opéra national de Paris and the Solistes XXI vocal
ensemble, Écho!
is
scored for two sopranos, alto, countertenor, two tenors, two basses, and
electronics. The text, by French
author Aleksi Barrière (born 1989) alludes to a poetic form popular in the 17th
and 18th centuries—the “echo” verse, in which parts of the text are repeated
with changes or comments on its meaning.
Saariaho chose to set the echo voice in the electronic part, with vocal
samples suggesting distance or reverberation. Following Barrière’s poetry, the
piece has three movements that explore the different aspects of an echo—from
Greek mythology traditions to contemporary senses of sympathetic vibration. The
vocal textures vary both within and across the movements, from imitative pairings at the beginning of the first
movement to the unison whispering of the word cruel at the beginning of the third.
—Judy Lochhead
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
Nuits, adieux
Nuits, adieux was
first composed in 1991 for four vocal soloists and electronics, and was later
arranged by her in 1997 for four soloists and mixed choir. Tonight’s version
for soloists, electronics, and visuals was conceived in 2007. The piece
explores themes of transformation—light into darkness, day into night, granite
into flowers.
The text of the work comes from two sources: The text for the “Nuit” sections
are taken from the dramatic poem Échanges
de la lumière (Exchanges of Light)
by contemporary French writer and mathematician Jacques Roubaud; the text for
the “Adieux” sections come from Honoré de Balzac’s novel Séraphita. Saariaho designs the music around the four stanzas of Roubaud’s
text and the single section of
Balzac’s. The work begins with two pairings of “Nuit” and
“Adieux” sections. Three “Nuit” sections follow, the middle one combining text
from the third and fourth stanzas. The work ends with a final “Adieux” section.
The sections are continuous while being musically and textually distinct.
—Judy Lochhead
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
Lonh
Written for soprano and electronics, Lonh
was a preparatory work for Saariaho’s first opera, L’amour de loin. Inspired by a song by 12th-century troubadour
Jaufré Rudel, Lonh explores the theme
of distant love. For most of the work, Saariaho chose to set the music in Occitan, the precursor of modern French
and the ancient language of Jaufré’s song—a compositional choice that enhances
the sense of distance. Structured formally around the stanzas of Jaufré’s song,
Lonh begins with a full presentation
of the text; however, over the course of the work, only selected phrases of the
text are delivered by the soprano—phrases addressing love, distance, and loss.
This process of clarity and its withdrawal occurs in the musical structure of Lonh, as well. The opening of the work
alludes strongly to the musical structures of Jaufré’s song, the soprano melody
organized around the modal center of D. The modal focus of the opening gives
way over the course of Lonh to more distant modal allusions, moving almost
imperceptibly to chromatic melodic and harmonic constructions at the work’s
end.
The music of Lonh consists of two strands: a solo soprano voice that is
sometimes electronically enhanced, and electronic sounds. Of the electronic
sounds, some are sampled from birds, voices, and various percussion
instruments, while others are electronically generated. All sounds in the
electronic part were produced at Ircam; the sampled sounds have been digitally
transformed in various ways.
—Judy Lochhead
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
From the Grammar of Dreams
From the Grammar of Dreams
exists
in two forms, the first from 1988 for soprano and mezzo-soprano, and the second
(tonight’s version) from 2002 for soprano and electronics. Both versions set
texts by American poet Sylvia Plath: the poem “Paralytic” from the collection Ariel (published posthumously in 1965) and a segment from
Plath’s autobiographical novel, The Bell
Jar (1963). Both texts reflect on
the depressive mental state, bordering on the surreal or paranormal.
Saariaho’s choice of texts came from a
larger interest in the nature of dream states and the particular ways in which
coherence and irrationality shade into one another. She explores this
idea through textual renderings that both suggest and obscure linguistic
clarity. From the Grammar of Dreams
consists of five songs that distribute the texts in diverse ways across the
vocal and electronic part; the delivery of both words and phonemes embodies a
nearly manic contrast of mood.
—Judy Lochhead
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
Tag des Jahrs
The first version of Tag des Jahrs is
for choir and electronics, and in this arrangement by Rachid Safir, the vocal
parts have been redistributed for two sopranos, alto, countertenor, two tenors,
and two basses. The music sets four poems by German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin that were written during the
latter years of his life after becoming mentally
unstable; in fact, some of these later poems were penned under the name
of Scardanelli and given fictitious composition dates in both the distant past
and future. These time discrepancies in Hölderlin’s poems fascinated Saariaho;
she came to understand them as “visions of lived moments that pass in the
twinkling of an eye and then vanish or transform into new, intensive moments.”
The work comprises four movements that follow the seasons, starting with
spring. The vocal parts often move in rhythmic unison and feature imitative
counterpoint: Saariaho chose a more “archaic” choral treatment because of the
traditional implications of Hölderlin’s text. However, this more traditional
choral setting is unsettled by the juxtaposition against the electronic part.
The electronic part consists of sampled voices, birds, wind, and various other
sounds of nature, as well as electronically generated sounds. The inclusion of
such sounds from the natural world underscores the role of nature in
Hölderlin’s text and serves as a kind of 21st-century text painting.
—Judy Lochhead
© 2012 The Carnegie Corporation