2023-08-18 17:30:06
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in Helsinki, August 18, 2022. EMMI KORHONEN/AFP
Although weakened by the cerebral disease that was to take her away on Friday June 2, Kaija Saariaho attended, at the end of October 2022, the recording sessions of half a dozen works, magnificently interpreted by the Helsinki Chamber Choir. , which lead today to a discographic panorama as moving as it is important.
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Devoting an entire album to its choral production seems to go without saying for someone born in Finland, a veritable eldorado of the choir. However, when we consider the music of Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), on a general level, it is electronics that comes to mind (computer processing of sounds) and when we consider it from the vocal angle, it’s opera (especially Innocence, created in Aix-en-Provence in 2021). One (technological device) and the other (lyrical vocals) are nevertheless perceptible in this program, which also contrasts with the previous monographs by the quasi-permanence of the family element in the inspiration or the realization of the works.
The disc thus opens with a vocal cycle, Nights, farewells, for four singers and electronics, which Kaija Saariaho dedicated to the memory of his grandmother. A masterpiece of poetic projection (texts by Jacques Roubaud and Honoré de Balzac) in the literal sense (“In the air, light is torn from the earth to the dark”) as much as technique (use of two types of microphone to measure the amplification and the reverberation of the voices). Incantatory solo, the music is collectively endowed with a rare power of elevation. Much like Saariaho, the space gradually takes on a cosmic dimension and the treatment of the voice, ample and sensual, already announces that of Love from afar (2000), his first opera.
Texts by his son
Conceived, according to the composer, as a lullaby likely to accompany an elderly person towards his last sleep, Nights, farewells confines itself to the sacred. Not so with the work that follows it. Yet, Clock, shut up! (2005) also deals with death and, again, under the aegis of the family.
This time, it was a text by her son (Aleksi Barrière, then aged 15) that Kaija Saariaho set to music for a piece for the children’s choir in which her daughter (Aliisa Neige Barrière) sang. Rhythmic and playful, this countdown to death is not lacking in seduction.
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Always composed on a text by Aleksi Barrière, the house “librettist”, Echo ! (2007), for eight voices and electronics, is a sophisticated work which revisits the myth of Echo and Narcissus by avoiding easy figuralism (no chamber…echo, but a subtle play with silence) and developing a authentic dramaturgy. Quite a symbol, insofar as the art of Kaija Saariaho consists in declining resonance at all levels.
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