Gramophone Contemporary Award 2024: Saariaho's Château de l’âme, Maan varjot, Offrande & True Fire

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

The Finnish composer’s unique voice is captured in works for varied ensembles

The death of Kaija Saariaho in June 2023 robbed us of a unique voice in contemporary music. Her fusion of poetic sensibility, intellectual grasp and aural precision is captivating in itself, but it is also a reproach to the pressures of 21st-century populist marketability. Her music, unlike so much that orchestras feel compelled to programme today, never panders to the lowest common denominator.

It’s not only sentiment that makes this disc award-worthy. Each work comes in digestible chunks of an average five minutes’ duration: poems rather than novels, in effect. This is surely where Saariaho’s greatest strengths lie, and it makes her blend of neo-impressionism and neo-expressionism hard to resist.

The individuality of Saariaho’s tone of voice is never in doubt, and her control over a musical gamut from microtones to octave unisons is remarkable

The language is certainly eclectic – Lutosławski and Ligeti are the first influences that spring to mind in the three-movement Maan varjot (‘Earth’s Shadows’) for organ and orchestra, followed by Messiaen and Dutilleux, to whose memory the work is dedicated. But the individuality of Saariaho’s tone of voice is never in doubt, and her control over a musical gamut from microtones to octave unisons is remarkable.

The vocal works, too, show her unfailing ability to spin out fine traceries of sound from apparently any succession of notes. Resist their charms and you might find some of them clichéd, even modish; but submit to the sustained intensity of the live performances, faithfully captured by Radio France, and besides meditative beauty you will find outbursts of passion, even fury, that serve to humanise her entrancing sound world. David Fanning

The Recording

Saariaho Château de l’âme. Maan varjot. Offrande. True Fire

Faustine de Monès sop Davóne Tines bar Anssi Karttunen vc Olivier Latry org Chorus of Radio France; French National Orchestra / Olari Elts; Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra / Hannu Lintu, Ernest Martinez-Izquierdo

Radio France (3/24)

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