In the nineteen-seventies, when the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho was studying at the Sibelius Academy, in Helsinki, she had spells of paralyzing insecurity. Her teacher, Paavo Heininen, told her to stand before a mirror ten times a day and say, “I can do it.” Indeed, she could. Saariaho, who is now sixty-four, has been a major force in contemporary music for decades, and by the end of the fall season in New York her work will have been as ubiquitous as Beethoven’s. The New York Philharmonic recently presented a Saariaho evening at the Park Avenue Armory. On November 19th and 20th, the International Contemporary Ensemble and students from the Mannes School of Music will perform “La Passion de Simone,” her oratorio in honor of Simone Weil. Axiom, the Juilliard new-music group, will play a Saariaho program on December 12th. And, on December 1st, her opera “L’Amour de Loin” (“Love from Afar”), an entrancing tale of doomed medieval love, enters the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera.
Saariaho may have had her crises of doubt, but from the start she knew what she wanted. Her elemental idea, which can be found in dozens of her scores, is an oceanic expanse of sound, one that shifts before one’s ears and quivers with hidden life. She first captured it in Paris, in the early eighties, when she was based at ircam, Pierre Boulez’s center for music and technology. She had come in contact with the Spectralist school of composers, the likes of Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, who were analyzing the acoustic properties of sound and deriving musical structures from them. Saariaho’s work, like theirs, moves between extremes of pure tone and noise, often finding a cryptic beauty in the middle zone. The opening gesture of “L’Amour de Loin” is exemplary: from a deep, shuddering B-flat a complex chord of overtones accumulates, seeming to resound not only in space but within the mind. We have entered the consciousness of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, who, in the first scene, is seen composing a chanson and contemplating unachievable love.
Many scores in Saariaho’s catalogue, and not just the theatrical ones, are visually suggestive, with titles alluding to light, water, gardens, and night. At the Armory, the Philharmonic capitalized on that painterly quality by creating a multimedia Saariaho experience, consisting of four pieces in unbroken succession: “Lumière et Pesanteur,” or “Light and Gravity”; “d’om le vrai sens,” or “Man’s True Sense,” a clarinet concerto; “Lonh,” for voice and electronics; and “Circle Map,” for orchestra and electronics. Pierre Audi, the new artistic director of the Armory, handled the production, encouraging the soloists—the clarinettist Kari Kriikku and the soprano Jennifer Zetlan—to wander through the Armory’s open space. The composer and video artist Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Saariaho’s husband, provided a beguiling stream of medieval and abstract images, which were shown on a large screen above the orchestra. The Philharmonic played brilliantly under Esa-Pekka Salonen, Saariaho’s former classmate at the Sibelius Academy.
The danger with this sort of presentation is that it might distract from musical values. “d’om le vrai sens,” though, is already semi-theatrical in conception. It is based on the series of fifteenth-century tapestries known as “The Lady and the Unicorn,” in which a woman of high station is seen in the company of a unicorn, a lion, a monkey, and other creatures, in allegorical depictions of the five senses. The clarinettist, making use of multiphonics (techniques to produce multiple tones at once), conjures the animals with bellowing, squawking, chattering, and neighing sounds. (Unicorns neigh, it turns out.) The soloist is directed to move about the venue, and, at the end, a number of violinists join him. Kriikku—another member of the potent Sibelius Academy crew of the seventies and eighties—threw himself into the role, at times playing one-handed and almost dancing. Kriikku has been electrifying every time I’ve seen him perform, whether in Magnus Lindberg’s “Kraft,” at the Ojai Festival, or in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, at Mostly Mozart. His physicality complements Saariaho’s otherworldly aura.
“Circle Map,” which was written in 2012, takes inspiration from poems by Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic. The dominant image in Barrière’s video is a hand executing Persian calligraphy; the electronic component of the score includes recordings of Rumi being recited in Persian, which undergo considerable manipulation. The lines that translate as “Walk to the well, / Turn as the earth and the moon turn” emerge as a deep, guttural blur, almost like avant-garde heavy-metal vocals; at other times, the voice is little more than a breath. The orchestra traverses a similar range. Episodes of ethereal stillness—a gentle tangle of flutes, a swish of cymbals, a glistening of harp, piano, and celesta—give way to more sharply delineated gestures, such as strutting syncopated chords in the piano or throbbing pulses in the drums.
An opulent climax arrives in the penultimate movement, with grandiose, savage brass utterances fleshing out the lines “Look at your eyes. They are small, / but they see enormous things.” Presenting Rumi in overlapping media—the written word, the speaking voice, projected translations, musical transpositions—might have resulted in a muddle, but the production instead achieved an uncanny triangulation: in keeping with the title, elusive presences were mapped from various angles. We never see Rumi’s “enormous things,” but we certainly hear them.
“It sounded so fresh, it was just unbelievable,” Saariaho has said of the music of Grisey, whose explorations of inner worlds of sound profoundly influenced composers of recent decades. He died lamentably young, at the age of fifty-two, in 1998: his final work, “Quatre Chants Pour Franchir le Seuil,” or “Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold,” is a fearsome meditation on the end of a life and the end of the world. Grisey is well known in the new-music world but somewhat obscure outside of it. Although Alan Gilbert has sporadically promoted him at the Philharmonic, it was left to a musically attuned visitor—the Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, appearing with her company, Rosas, at bam—to arrange what may have been the composer’s highest-profile event in New York to date: a dance piece based on “Vortex Temporum,” a forty-five-minute soundscape for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano.
The title, which means “vortex of times,” signals Grisey’s fascination with varieties of musical time. He liked to imagine time on vastly different scales: as humans experience it (normal); as whales experience it (expanded); and as birds and insects experience it (compressed). “Vortex” begins with an insectoid fury of arpeggios, and a subsequent piano solo borders on hyperkinetic free jazz. The middle section, in severe contrast, is an exercise in extreme deceleration. Descending patterns on the piano give the feeling of a staircase that goes down and down without ever reaching the bottom, and the other instruments melt away into rustlings and breathing sounds. At the very end, the score approaches total stasis—the still point at the center of the vortex.
De Keersmaeker’s staging began with an arresting coup de théâtre. The instrumentalists, from the Belgian ensemble Ictus, played the first part alone; then the dancers performed a silent sequence that, one gradually realized, matched the preceding music. After that, the borders between dancing and playing blurred: the musicians were in constant motion, and the pianist Jean-Luc Plouvier somehow executed his part while dancers wheeled his instrument to and fro. At times, the choreographic gestures—leaps, skips, pirouettes, and the like—struck me as too pedestrian, but the distribution of bodies onstage, particularly in the spiralling stampede of the final section, mirrored Grisey’s cosmic chaos. The great thing was simply to see it played, before a rapt, tense crowd. When the right frame is found, allegedly difficult modern music becomes second nature. ♦
