For the fifth season, The Santa Fe Opera, in collaboration with Santa Fe New Music, is presenting an evening of chamber music by the living composer whose opera is being performed in the summer season. This year it is the esteemed Finnish composer, Kaija Saariaho. Ms. Saariaho's opera, Adriana Mater will receive its American premiere beginning July 26. The concert takes place Saturday, April 19 at 7:00 in The Santa Fe Opera's Stieren Hall.
Born in Helsinki in 1952, Kaija Saariaho enjoys worldwide renown; Santa Fe audiences will recall the 2002 American premiere of her first opera, L'Amour de loin. This summer features the American premiere of Adriana Mater with an original libretto by Amin Maalouf. The opera was directed by Peter Sellars and premiered at Paris' Opéra Bastille in March 2006. Sellars will direct the Santa Fe production, as he did for L' Amour de loin.
"For opera lovers and new music aficionados alike, the concert is an opportunity to become acquainted with the breadth of Sarriaho's oeuvre and with her unique musical vocabulary. It is also a testimonial to the vibrancy and relevance of the music of our time—from chamber works to grand opera," said John Kennedy, Artistic Director of Santa Fe New Music.
The program features chamber works and solo works with electronics. The version of Terrestre is a reworking of the second movement of the two-movement flute concerto, Aile du songe (Wing of Dream), commissioned by Santa Fean Eleanor Eisenmenger in honor of Saariaho's 50th birthday. The world premiere took place in Weill Concert Hall in 2004.
Program: Cendres (1998) for flute, cello, and piano; Noa Noa (1992) for flute and electronics; Japanese Gardens (1994) for percussion and electronics; Sept Papillons (2000) for cello; Terrestre (2003) for flute, violin, cello, harp, and percussion.
The performers are Danielle Cho, cello; Margaret Lancaster, flute; David Tolen, percussion; Debbie Wagner, piano; Lynn Gorman, harp; Megan Julyan-Holland, violin; John Kennedy, conductor.
Saariaho writes: "While writing Cendres, (1998), I was mainly concentrating on the interpretation of particular musical ideas by the three different instruments of the trio, each of which has its unique character and palette of colors. Musical tension is created and regulated by sometimes bringing the instruments as close together as possible in all ways (pitch, rhythm, dynamics, articulation, color etc.), or, at the other extreme, letting each of them express the music in their most idiomatic fashion. Between these two extremes there is an unlimited number of possible ways to create more or less homogenous musical situations. The consciousness of this variety was the rope on which I was balancing whilst working on the piece."
Saariaho: "Noa Noa (Fragrant, 1992) was born from the ideas I had for flute while writing my ballet music Maa. I wanted to write down, exaggerate, even abuse certain flute mannerisms that had been haunting me for some years, and thus force myself to move onto something new. Formally I experimented with an idea of developing several elements simultaneously, first sequentially, then superimposed on each other. The title refers to a wood cut by Paul Gauguin called Noa Noa. It also refers to a travel diary of the same name, written by Gauguin during his visit to Tahiti in 1891-93. The fragments of phrases selected for the voice part in the piece come from this book."
Saariaho: "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. 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."
Sept Papillons was the first piece Saariaho wrote after her opera L'Amour de loin and it was partly written during the rehearsals of the opera in Salzburg. One can sense the desire to find a new world, which has nothing to do with the opera either in style or in language. From the metaphors of the opera which all have an eternal quality - love, yearning and death - she moved to a metaphor of the ephemeral: butterfly. Also, from the long time-spans of the opera she moved to these seven miniatures, which each seem to be studies on a different aspect of fragile and ephemeral movement that has no beginning or end.
Terrestre is a reworking of the second movement of the two-movement flute concerto. The titles of the two works derive from the collection of poems by Saint-John Perse, Oiseaux (Birds), which served as a source of inspiration in the solo flute piece Laconisme de l'aile. The poet speaks of the birds' flight and uses the rich metaphor of the bird to describe life's mysteries through an abstract and multidimensional language. Unlike Olivier Messiaen, Saariaho is more interested in the idea of the bird than in its singing. Terrestre falls into two parts. The first, Oiseau Dansant (Dancing Bird), refers to an aboriginal tale in which a virtuosic dancing bird teaches a whole village how to dance. The second section, L'Oiseau, un satellite infime, is a synthesis of the previous parts of the concerto. In the poet's words, the bird is a small satellite in a universal orbit. That poetic image brings to mind words that Saariaho wrote at the beginning of her career: "My wish is to go further, and deeper." -- www.santafeopera.org
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