Erik T. Tawaststjerna BALLADS & OTHER STORIES

BALLADS & OTHER STORIES

Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Hannu Lintu KAIJA SAARIAHO True Fire - Trans - Ciel d'hiver

TRUE FIRE - TRANS - CIEL D'HIVER

Jennifer Koh SAARIAHO X KOH

SAARIAHO X KOH

Wilhelmina Smith ESA-PEKKA SALONEN - KAIJA SAARIAHO Works for Solo Cello

WORKS FOR SOLO CELLO

Peter Herresthal / Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra / Clément Mao-Takacs KAIJA SAARIAHO Graal théâtre - Circle Map - Vers toi qui es si loin

Several of Kaija Saariaho’s works are named after natural phenomena that serve as a starting point to her compositional process. Composed in 1998, Neiges was inspired by various qualities of snow and explores instrumental languages and colours similar to those found in her earlier works. On the present album the piece is heard in its never-before recorded version for twelve cellos, performed by the cellists of the Oslo Philharmonic. Another source of inspiration has been medieval literature, which formed a point of departure for Graal Théâtre, the first concerto Saariaho wrote, as well as for the recent Vers toi qui es si loin (2018). Recorded for the first time here, the piece is a transcription, made for the violinist Peter Herresthal, of an aria from the opera L’Amour de loin. These two works for violin and orchestra bookend this amply filled disc, and frame Circle Map, a work in six movements for large orchestra. Permeating the work are six short poems by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, providing inspiration through their essence and vivid imagery, but also part of the musical material by way of a recording of them recited in Persian. This recording forms the raw material for the electronics included in the work, but also for much of the writing for the orchestra, for instance in terms of pitches and intonations. All four works are conducted by Clément Mao Takacs, who has collaborated extensively with Kaija Saariaho and conducted her music across Europe and in the U.S.A.

Wilhelmina Smith ESA-PEKKA SALONEN - KAIJA SAARIAHO Works for Solo Cello

This solo album by cellist Wilhelmina Smith features works for solo cello by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Kaija Saariaho. Both composers belong to a generation of modernist Finnish composers whose work has gained broad acceptance in musical culture throughout the world. While each composer has a clear individual artistic persona, as a group they are known for pushing sonic boundaries. In writing for strings and, in particular on this recording, the cello, Salonen and Saariaho exploit the outer reaches of the technical possibilities for both the instrument and the performer. Wilhelmina Smith is an artist of intense commitment, poetic insight and dazzling versatility. As a soloist and recitalist as well as a collaborative musician and festival director, Smith has consistently advocated for composers with whom she has developed vital relationships, to have their music creatively positioned within an intellectually engaging context and performed with the utmost passion and technical assurance.

Trio Aristos NORDSENDING

Nordsending was the name given by southern Norwegian people of the late Medieval and Early Modern period to magical attacks from the sorcerous sub-Arctic and Arctic. It was the ‘broadcast from the north’. Other peoples had other names for it, but they all understood it similarly: the invisible medium through which splinters of iron, stone arrowheads and little mice were shot into the bodies of the healthy by Northern witches.
With this programme of string trios – and one duo – by four Nordic composers, Trio Aristos has devised a nordsending of their own: thoroughly contemporary, but equally magical. The members of Trio Aristos have in various constellations worked with each of the composers – most extensively with Per Nørgård, the grand old man of Danish music, who is represented here with three works composed in the years around 1990, including the duo Tjampuan for violin and cello.
His younger colleagues all contribute one work each to the disc, written between 2009 and 2014. Kaija Saariaho found inspiration for her four-movement trio in different cloud formations, while Bent Sørensen added to a series of works inspired by Venice when he composed Gondole: its five movements are impressions of gondolas waltzing, mourning and falling in love. Gondole was commissioned by Trio Aristos, and so was Rift, by the Norwegian composer Henrik Hellstenius, who recomposed the piece for these performers from his earlier series Imprints.

Camilla Hoitenga / Da Camera of Houston KAIJA SAARIAHO Let the Wind Speak

"Let the Wind Speak" is as much an exploration of Kaija Saariaho’s flute writing as her long-time collaboration with soloist Camilla Hoitenga, who plays everything from piccolo to bass flute, vocalizing and executing multiphonics with organic ease.

The oldest and most widely performed work, Laconisme de l’aile (track 10), which the Finnish composer first presented her in 1982, moves from a short poetry recitation into fitful, rapidly fluctuating lyricism, only to end with a series of rising scales before the sound vanishes into thin air. In Couleurs du Vent, performed on alto flute, Hoitenga seamlessly blends speech with extended techniques.

Works such as these reveal Saariaho’s ability to combine melodic invention with a relentless push toward new technical frontiers. The opening track, Tocar, reorchestrated for flute and harp (Héloîse Dautry), has the feeling of a recitative as the flute sings above rivulets of archaic sound. Faultless audio engineering preserves the fine balance between two instruments more often noted for their timbral contrast.

A similar principle applies to Mirrors, here performed in three different versions together with cellist Anssi Karttunen. Mirrors II draws upon furious melodies and wide range of color, while Mirrors III is more reticent and slow-moving, Karttunen’s trembling and scraping textures adding to the sense of unease.

The album’s centerpiece, Sombre I-III, was commissioned from the chamber ensemble Da Camera of Houston and premiered at the Rothko Chapel in 2013. In keeping with the tone of the painted walls, Saariaho opted for dark colors such as bass flute and baritone (Daniel Belcher) as she set three fragments of Ezra Pound’s last Cantos. Intricate percussion intermingles with hovering, unearthly atmospheres to create a soundscape as spiritually vast as it is intimate. “Do not move/Let the wind speak/that is paradise,” declares the speaker after surmounting a thick instrumental haze in the inner movement. But it may be Hoitenga, and not Belcher, who holds center ground as an insidious stream of bass flute colors the third and final poem. (Rebecca Schmid)

Thierry Miroglio KAIJA SAARIAHO Six Japanese Gardens - Trois Rivières Delta

Six Japanese Gardens is a collection of impressions of the gardens I saw in Kyoto during my stay in Japan in the summer of 1993 and my reflection on rhythm at that time.
As the title indicates, the piece is divided into six parts. All these parts give specific look at a rhythmic material, starting from the simplistic first part, in which the main instrumentation is introduced, going to complex polyrhythmic or ostinato figures, or alternation of rhythmic and purely coloristic material.
The selection of instruments played by the percussionist is voluntarily reduced to give space for the perception of rhythmic evolutions. Also, the reduced colours are extended with the addition of an electronics part, in which we hear nature's sounds, ritual singing, and percussion instruments recorded in the Kuntachi College of Music with Shinti Ueno. The ready-mixed sections are triggered by the percussionist during the piece, from a Macintosh computer.
All the work for processing and mixing the pre-recorded material was done with a Macintosh computer in my home studio. Some transformations are made with the resonant filters in the CHANT program, and with the SVP Phaser Vocoder. This work was made with Jean-Baptiste Barrière. The final mixing was made with the Protools program with the assistance of Hanspeter Stubbe Teglbjaerg.
The piece is commissioned by the Kunitachi College of Music and written for Shinti Ueno. (Kaija Saariaho)

Anu Komsi / Avanti! / Hannu Lintu KAIJA SAARIAHO From the Grammar of Dreams

Grammaire des Rêves (Grammar of Dreams, 1988-89) was born from my curiosity about the relationship between human voice and instruments, a subject which I had put aside for many years. As the title of the piece indicates, another source of interest was the structural life of dreams.

Different ideas concerning the research of dreams (for example, how our moving body affects our dreams, changing their directions or interrupting them; in this piece the harp is imagined as a collection of restless limbs, which by their movements direct the musical flow), are drawn to the background during the compositional work, or are transformed into purely musical form.
Another interest was to search for a fusion in this rather heterogeneous ensemble. For this reason the musical texture is maybe more simple than in some other of my recent pieces, and the more radical textural changes have been replaced by vibratos, trills, glissandi, dynamic evolutions and other gestures, used here as imaginary matrices, through which the instrumental parts are ‘filtered’.

The major part of the text is a collage from the texts of Paul Eluard. Some longer fragments have been used from his poem ‘Premierèment’ (‘L’Amour la Poésie’).

Grammaire des Rêves is dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Barrière; the first performance was in Paris on the 23rd March 1989 by Ensemble l’Itineraire with Esa-Pekka Salonen. (Kaija Saariaho)

KAIJA SAARIAHO Trios

Award-winning composer Kaija Saariaho frequently draws inspiration from extra-musical sources, be they the night sky, the natural environment or literature. Saariaho studied music and fine arts in parallel before taking up composition, the latter at the graphic arts department of the University of Art and Design Helsinki. She studied composition with Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy from 1976 to 1981 and continued with Brian Ferneyhough at the Freiburg Music Academy, completing her diploma in 1983.
This album is devoted to chamber music which exhibits the same rich sense of instrumental colors and feeling of dramatic contrast as her celebrated orchestral works.
In 2008, Saariaho was named 'Composer of the Year' by Musical America. In addition, she has received several internationally distinguished awards, including the Grawemeyer Composition Award for her opera L'Amour de loin in 2003. In 1997, she was awarded one of France's highest cultural honours, the title 'Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres'.
Kaija Saariaho has been commissioned by the BBC, Ircam, the New York Philharmonic, the Lincoln Center in New York, the Salzburg Music Festival, the Théâtre de Châtelet in Paris and the Finnish National Opera, among others. (Ondine)

Dawn Upshaw - Esa-Pekka Salonen KAIJA SAARIAHO La Passion de Simone

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics. Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L’Amour de loin and Adriana Mater and the oratorio La Passion de Simone.

I have been reading Simone Weil’s writings since my youth. The Finnish translation of her book Gravity and Grace was one of the few things I packed into my suitcase when I travelled to Germany in 1981 to continue my studies in composition. Later, I began to read her writings in the original French and also learned more about her life.

The combination of Weil’s severe asceticism and her passionate quest for truth has appealed to me ever since I first read her thoughts. La passion de Simone was specifically the result of collaboration with Amin Maalouf and Peter Sellars; together we chose the different parts of Weil’s work and life for the libretto before I began composing. Whereas I have always been fascinated by Simone’s striving for abstract (mathematical) and spiritual-intellectual goals, Peter is interested in her social awareness and political activities. Amin brought out the gaping discrepancy between her philosophy and her life, showing the fate of the frail human being amongst great ideas. In addition to Simone Weil’s life and ideas, many general questions of human existence are presented in Amin’s text.

La Passion consists of 15 stations. The idea for the form of the text and the entire work came from the Passion play tradition. This outer form is, however, the only similarity to the traditional oratorio, at least in my opinion. The 15 movements are different in character and structure, and they shed light on different moments in Simone Weil’s life and interpret some of her ideas. The soprano has the crucial role of the narrator. Weil’s own texts are presented in the electronics surrounding the audience. The choir and orchestra create the world in which live both the soprano part and the spoken words in the electronics part.

La Passion de Simone is dedicated to my children Alex and Aliisa.
(Kaija Saariaho)