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Born Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki, Finland, Kaija Saariaho lived a childhood embedded in music, playing several instruments. She started art studies at the Fine Arts School of Helsinki but quickly decided to concentrate on music. At Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy Saariaho worked with the pioneering modernist Paavo Heininen and then continued her studies in Freiburg with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber.
From 1982 Saariaho attended IRCAM (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music) in Paris—the city that has been her home ever since. There she developed techniques of computer-assisted composition and acquired fluency in working both on tape and with live electronics. This experience influenced her approach to writing for orchestra, with its emphasis on the shaping of dense masses of sound in slow transformations. Significantly, her first orchestral piece, Verblendungen (1984), involves a gradual exchange of roles and character between orchestra and tape. The titles which Saariaho gave to her next linked pair of orchestral works, Du Cristal (1989) and . . . à la Fumée (1990), suggest their preoccupation with colour and texture.
Critics often cite the important influence of the Spectralist movement on Saariaho: composers such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail whose techniques are based on computer analysis of the sound-spectrum of individual notes on different instruments. This analytical approach led her to regularly use harmonies resting on long-held bass notes, microtonal intervals, and a precisely detailed continuum of sound extending from pure tone to unpitched noise—all features of one of her most frequently performed works, Graal théâtre for violin and orchestra or ensemble (1994/97).
From the mid 1990s, Saariaho began to expand beyond electronics, often writing strictly acoustic pieces, focusing increasingly on melody and turning to larger forces and broader structures such as opera. L’amour de loin (Love from Afar), her first opera, received widespread acclaim after its premiere at the 2000 Salzburg Festival. Adriana Mater, her next opera, intertwines a dream world with gritty present-day reality and was a commission for the Opéra National de Paris’s 2006 season. Her most recent opera, Émilie, was written as a monodrama for fellow Finn, Karita Mattila and premiered in Lyon in March 2010. Amin Maalouf was the librettist for all three of these works.
Throughout her career Saariaho has maintained close associations with individual artists including her librettist, Amin Maalouf , director Peter Sellars, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, flautist Camilla Hoitenga, cellist Anssi Karttunen, soprano Dawn Upshaw and, more recently, pianist Emmanuel Ax. With her choice of subject matter and texts and with the profusion of expressive marks in her scores, Saariaho strives to make music that is more than just a working-out of abstract processes, turning it instead into an urgent communication of ideas, images and emotions between composer and listener.
Born Feb. 25, 1949 in Beirut, Lebanon, author Amin Maalouf studied sociology and economics before joining the Lebanese daily newspaper An-Nahar, where he travelled the world covering international politics. With the onset of the Lebanese civil war, Maalouf moved to Paris in 1976, where he continued his work in journalism as an editor before moving on to his literary career.
His work includes The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1986), Leo Africanus (1986), Samarkand (1988), The Gardens of Light (1991), The First Century After Beatrice (1992), Prix Goncourt winner The Rock of Tanios (1993), Ports of Call (1996), Balthasar’s Odyssey (2000) and Origins: A Memoir (2004), winner of the Prix Mediterranée. Written in French, his works have been translated into more than 40 languages.
He has also written four librettos for Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, including L’amour de loin (2000), Adriana Mater (2006), La Passion de Simone (2006) and Émilie (2010).
Russell Braun as Jaufré (downstage left), Erin Wall as Clémence (back, centre) and Krisztina Szabó as the Pilgrim (downstage right) in the Canadian Opera Company production of Love from Afar, 2012. Photo: Michael Cooper
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