KAIJA SAARIAHO
Aile du Songe (“Wing of the Dream”), Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (2001)
Kaija Saariaho is one of the most prominent creative voices of Finland, whose generous support for the arts has given it a musical culture matched by that of few other nations. Saariaho was born in Helsinki in 1952 and took her professional training at the Helsinki University of Art and Design and the Sibelius Academy, where her teachers included Paavo Heininen. She continued her studies at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, and attended courses in computer music at Darmstadt and IRCAM in Paris. She has lived in Paris since 1982. Saariaho’s instrumental and vocal works — modern, luminous, shifting patterns of sound with a strong emotional core — have earned her such distinctions as the Kranichsteiner Preis, Prix Italia, Ars Electronica Prize, Nordic Music Prize, Rolf Schock Prize, Kaske Prize, Stoeger Award of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Nemmers Prize, Wihuri Prize and Sonning Prize; she was named Musical America’s “Composer of the Year” for 2008 and was Bloch Professor in Music at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. Saariaho’s first opera, the visionary L’Amour de loin (“Love from Afar”), with a libretto by the Lebanese-French journalist and novelist Amin Maalouf based on an early biography of the 12thcentury troubadour Jaufré Rudel, received widespread acclaim upon its premiere at the 2000 Salzburg Festival, and won her a prestigious Grawemeyer Award and a Grammy Award. L’Amour de loin was given its American premiere by Santa Fe Opera in July 2002 and first staged by the Metropolitan Opera in December 2016. Her most recent opera, Innocence, with an original Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen and a multilingual libretto by Aleksi Barriere, was premiered in July 2021 to exceptional praise by the Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence. Additional productions of Innocence, based on a painfully contemporary story about the aftermath of a fatal school shooting in Helsinki, are scheduled at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Finnish National Opera, San Francisco Opera, Dutch National Opera and Metropolitan Opera. * * * Alexis Leger, who published his poetry under the nom de plume of Saint-John Perse, was born in 1887 in Guadeloupe, studied law at the University of Bordeaux, joined the French diplomatic service in 1914, and served in prominent positions in China, Europe and, during World War II, in Washington, D.C.; he remained in the United States until 1967. Leger/Perse wrote poetry throughout his life, but he was most prolific after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960. He died in Provence in 1975. Kaija Saariaho came to know Perse’s long poem Oiseaux (“Birds”) soon after it was published in 1963, and she was particularly taken with its passages that “somehow described images I had in my mind: those of birds, fighting gravity, flying away, secret and immortal.” Under its influence in 1982, Saariaho composed Laconisme de l’aile (“Laconism of the Wing”) for solo flute and electronics to evoke “not bird song but rather the lines they draw in the sky when they are flying.” In 1992, she took Amers, Perse’s 1957 book of poems dedicated to the sea, as the title and inspiration for her work for cello soloist and seven players. (An amers is a natural or manmade fixed point used for navigation.) Aile du Songe (“Wing of the Dream”), a concerto for flute and orchestra inspired by Perse’s Oiseaux, was composed in 2011; Terrestre (“Terrestrial ”), a reworking of the second movement of Aile du Songe for flute and chamber ensemble, followed a year later, as did Poèmes de Saint-Jean Perse: extracts from “Oiseaux,” in which Saariaho embedded spoken recitation of several excerpts from the poem in her original “sonic environments.” Photo of Kaija Saariaho ©Maarit Kyöharju 22
