FGWL #3 Kaija Saariaho - Reconnaissance (a work-in-progress)
When Kaija Saariaho visited GIDEST in fall 2016, our discussion focused on her creative practice. We were therefore thrilled to receive her contribution to From GIDEST With Love—a set of materials related to Reconnaissance, a work-in-progress with libretto by Aleksi Barrière.
As you explore the materials below, please listen to Kaija’s Ciel d’Hiver, instrumental music which, as she says "has something of the atmosphere of the future piece."
Imagining the work.
Mount Sharp photographed by Mars Curiosity rover in January 2018 - Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Libretto by Aleksi Barrière.
Sketch for the musical dramaturgy on the composition's timeline.
Kaija Saariaho Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.
Harmonic material.
Kaija Saariaho Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.
A page from the first movement in manuscript.
Kaija Saariaho Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.
The same page, edited and completed.
Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are 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 luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics. Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-'90s she has turned also to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L’Amour de Loin and Adriana Mater and the oratorio La Passion de Simone. Saariaho has claimed the major composing awards in the Grawemeyer Award, Wihuri Prize, Nemmers Prize, Sonning Prize, and Polar Music Prize. In 2018 she received the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award. Always keen on strong educational programs, Saariaho was the music mentor of the 2014-15 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and was in residence at U.C. Berkeley Music Department in 2015. Her first opera, L'Amour de Loin, was presented in its New York premiere by the Metropolitan Opera in a new production by Robert Le Page. The Park Avenue Armory and New York Philharmonic presented a celebration of her orchestral music with visual accompaniment in October 2016. Her fifth opera, Innocence, was planned to be premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2020.
Aleksi Barrière is a French-Finnish writer and director. The music theatre company he has founded with conductor Clément Mao-Takacs, La Chambre aux échos, has created and toured multiple projects in Europe and commissioned new works. In the US, Aleksi’s stagings were last seen at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in NYC (Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone in 2016 with The New School) and at Trap Door Theatre in Chicago (the devised piece Letter Of Love - The Fundamentals of Judo, 2018); a piece by composer Diana Syrse set to one of his texts will be premiered by the New Juilliard Ensemble in the fall. His writing, like his theatre work, is turned towards collaborative processes, and explores mixed languages, porous borders and grey areas.