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      Kaija Saariaho’s Luminous Music Was a Personal Invitation

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      The Finnish composer, who died at 70, is remembered by one of her longtime collaborators.The history of classical music is a history of creators of distinct originality. Its evolution has always happened through the work of visionary individuals and their ability to expand our understanding of the world through their works. These artists widen our horizons, invent, search, open doors and create paths for others. It takes extraordinary force, and courage, to follow an inner voice that no one else knows or understands yet.One of these visionaries was the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died on Friday at 70. Her legacy is monumentally important, luminous and larger than we can fully comprehend at this time.When I first got to know her as a person in the early 2000s, I had already admired her from a distance. She was a well-known figure in Finland, from the group Korvat Auki! (Ears Open!) in her youth and her collaborations with Avanti!, a summer festival, and in my mind, she and her music were one and the same.I conducted “Cinq Reflets” at the Helsinki Festival in 2002, and over the years that followed, I got to know both her and her musical universe more profoundly; and I came to understand how deeply personal her music really is. It is not something external, which is given or delivered to us. Rather, as I see it, it is something that allows us to enter into her intimate inner world. We are, generously, given an opportunity to look within her.It’s mind-blowing to see how a deeply personal creative voice can be so powerful that, even if the language expands in time and is more and more refined over the years and decades of their creative work, its originality shines through from the very beginning, so bright that it is immediately recognizable. Unlike anything else, it becomes a new element in the greater musical universe.Kaija’s music is like this: both new and timeless, both personal and universal, from the moment it is first heard. Whether her works are electronic or acoustic, staged or in concert, we are always transported to another time and place.The creative process for a composer is fundamentally solitary, but a characteristic element of Kaija’s working process was collaboration. She knew how the interaction between a creator and an interpreter means much more than simple questions of technique, volume or tempos — how it also means having the willingness to be on the same wavelength to be able to transmit the right atmosphere with the greatest care and respect. To write a role for a certain singer, a concerto for a soloist genuinely interested in her view of the instrument, an orchestra piece or an opera, knowing who would be conducting would, I believe, liberate her creative energy to full freedom.Her music is spellbindingly beautiful and reflects colorful imagination, but in a way it’s also a form of sonic research, through science and artisanship — and, always, poetry and reflection. Kaija has changed music because she has changed our perception and our way to listen. This music is living. It vibrates and breathes, and it has to get its own space and freedom, and it feels like it speaks to us from another world. Electronics and acoustic instruments, solo or full orchestra, the human voice, words, dreams — it’s fascinating and impressive how, in spite of different tools and changing proportions, the final result is always unique, but at the same time it also perfectly coheres with other pieces. It is a language in which specific sounds blend together and become an amazing paradox of crystal-clear precision and luminous haze.The most refined nuances are our sensory vocabulary, and in Kaija’s works nuance is everything: Understanding the essential meaning in each expression is key. For a composer, having her message passed on to the audience in the right way, with the right sensitivity, is absolutely essential.Kaija’s closest longtime collaborators — such as Jean-Baptiste Barrière, her husband; the cellist Anssi Karttunen; the flutist Camilla Hoitenga; and the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen — recognized her talent and trusted her instinct, understanding her unique voice from the beginning. There were us others of a younger generation who joined Kaija’s musical family later, and she would never fail to express how grateful she was for our work. We in turn will forever feel a deep gratitude for the trust, for all the ways she supported us through her warmth and care, and for all the friendships that have grown out of our shared love for her art.She was a mother, exceptionally devoted to her children and family. In time, her children Aleksi and Aliisa also became working partners, and Kaija repeatedly spoke about how much she learned from them and their observations. But this nurturing and caring weren’t limited to them alone. Having been allowed to be a part of her artistic family has been the greatest privilege imaginable; her generosity in supporting the young generation of composers and musicians is also an indicator of her thinking, which was aimed to keep building things bigger than ourselves. She was warm and funny too, and a very wise and compassionate friend — a truly, remarkably beautiful person, both outside and in.The courage with which Kaija built her life’s work is enormous, considering the condescending or humiliating attitudes she had to endure as a woman early in her career — be it in the press, by institutions or in private encounters. She never wanted to draw much attention to this, but there were hurtful experiences she only shared after years of close friendship. Her nobility and strength to rise above all that, however — in keeping on, then showing the way to others — was incredible, strong and exemplary. She knew that even in that respect, her work carried huge importance, but she chose to let the music speak for itself.She is and remains a role model, not only for her place in music history, but also for her ethics and her courage to speak up about topics that she considered important. She chose complex subjects for her operas, such as those of “Adriana Mater” and “Innocence,” and the theater would include everything: the unbearable truths, but also the soothing dream world — which for her was the most central element of “Innocence,” not the tragic events themselves. Through this genuine fearlessness and honesty, she restored many people’s belief in opera as art form.It is impossible to imagine the world — the music world or my own life — without Kaija. But her presence is with us in her art. What helps now, in the grief, is the inner light present in her works, which we will now keep carrying forward, always moving toward the light. More

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      Ian Bostridge on Music’s Fuzzy Boundaries of Identity

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      The beloved tenor’s latest book and album emerged from a time when the pandemic forced him to question what exactly he does when he sings.Spring this year has been a particular joy for touring singers like me. The cloud of Covid seems to have evaporated: Restrictions have been lifted, audiences have (nervously) returned and the prospect of being stranded in foreign parts with a positive test is gone, not to mention the diminishing threat of serious or voice-impacting illness. Things will never be the same — they never are — but some semblance of normalcy has returned.When the endless travels of classical music were interrupted, though, and when I was forced into a kind of silence, I had time and the inclination to question what I was doing, to ask what exactly I’m up to when I stand up and sing a song. This interacted with two projects that were conceived before the pandemic but were largely undertaken during it: “Song and Self,” lectures and a resulting book, and a recording of “The Folly of Desire,” a song cycle written by and performed with the pianist-composer Brad Mehldau.This spring saw the consummation of both, with the book out from the University of Chicago Press in April, and the album out on June 2 on the Pentatone label. In my writing, I looked at some iconic works — by Monteverdi, Schumann, Britten and Ravel — exploring them in the light of concerns about gender identity, colonialism and death. Mehldau’s work, resolutely art and not remotely a work of analysis, treats the multiform and problematic nature of sexual desire, sometimes with a shocking directness and sometimes with a glowing compassion, but always with a visceral beauty.WHEN I BECAME a professional musician, in the mid-1990s, I forged my reputation as a singer of songs — particularly of lieder, German art song, that very niche but hugely significant branch of classical music reinvented by Franz Schubert in the 1820s and brought to global prominence by the legendary baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau after World War II.Ian Bostridge, right, performing “The Folly of Desire,” with Brad Mehldau at the piano in 2019 at Zankel Hall in Manhattan.Stephanie BergerThe big discovery I came to, as I made my first tentative steps into the world of music theater, was that the distinction I had unconsciously made between “song” and “opera” was misconceived and inhibiting. The boundary between the two was, rather, fluid and permeable.Having seen Fischer-Dieskau perform toward the end of his career in the 1980s, I had already half-learned this lesson. To watch him perform even as purely lyrical a song as Schubert’s “Meeresstille,” a setting of Goethe’s poem about a ship becalmed at sea, was to see a master actor at work. Some of the great stage directors I have worked with in opera — Baz Luhrmann, David Alden, Deborah Warner — have encouraged me to bring the special intensity of the song recital, the “expressive intimacy” identified by my baritone colleague Christian Gerhaher in a recent book, to opera.Conversely, song recitals involve the presentation of a persona just as much as any other piece of music theater. And the boundaries between acting as impersonation (think Daniel Day-Lewis’s film performances) and as intensification of the reinvented self (now think of Cary Grant’s work with Hitchcock) are constantly shifting.Hybrid forms, neither opera nor conventional recital, are particularly interesting in this regard. Three pieces of music theater that I have been lucky enough to bring to Lincoln Center in New York — Seamus Heaney’s translation of Janacek’s “Diary of One Who Vanished,” directed by Warner, and Netia Jones’s stagings of Schubert’s “Winterreise,” in a version by Hans Zender, and of Britten’s “Curlew River” — were exactly that: staged song cycles in the first two cases, and reimagined ritual in third. They encouraged me even more to explore an issue that I found slippery and abstract at first, but that gradually took on a clearer form.Identity is something that all performers have to confront. Each time we stand onstage to deliver a text — literary or musical, or some combination of the two — we have a decision to make about its character, and about our stance toward it. How do we go about embodying it? Do we take on the identity of the material we have absorbed, or does it reconfigure itself as it is molded to our own identity? What is our duty to the text? To the audience? To ourselves?My book “Song and Self” explores and worries at issues of identity that come to the fore in some of the works I love — issues of gender, for example. Is the real protagonist of Robert Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -Leben” not the woman we see on the surface, but rather the composer, whose anxieties and passions inflect the cycle at every point? What difference does it make if the cycle is sung, as it was in the 19th century, by a man? Should I sing it today?Then again, how important is the gender of the Madwoman, which I have sung, in “Curlew River”? Britten uses the ritual resources of Japanese Noh theater to create a sort of distancing. Cross-gender casting is a part of this, but one which in blurring our perceptions of gender only amplifies the impact of the austerely told story: The Madwoman is all of us.Troubling political issues can also intersect with the sung persona as I discovered in my research into Ravel’s “Chansons Madécasses.” The second section of this powerful cycle, for voice and instrumental trio, is a setting of an 18th-century protest against longstanding French attempts to colonize Madagascar, voiced by a Malagasy. “Méfiez-vous des blancs” (“Beware of the whites”) he cries — but that cry was written by Évariste Parny, an opponent of slavery yet a slave owner.Ravel wrote the song in the midst of French colonial wars in North Africa, only a few decades after the bloody French conquest of Madagascar in 1896. Some early audiences saw the piece as political provocation. There’s something troubling about these twin acts of ventriloquism, Parny’s poem and Ravel’s music. In addressing the song we have to ask questions about the poet’s bad faith as a slaveholding abolitionist, about the composer’s motives and about our own. Who should sing this song? Who owns it?“Song and Self” is very much an exploratory work. It takes the notion of the essay at its word — as an attempt, an experiment. If I draw any conclusion, it’s that the way to approach classical music, in an era in which its relevance or ideological stance is constantly being questioned, is to explore where it comes from more closely, not to throw it away. Questioning is built into the classical music tradition; and interpreting this complex music that we have inherited means negotiating between the preoccupations of the past and the present so that we can discover more about ourselves.MEHLDAU’S “THE FOLLY OF DESIRE” demands similar questioning. I had first met Brad five or six years ago; he was playing jazz improvisations and I was singing “Winterreise,” we hit it off, and he offered to write song cycle for the two of us. What emerged, about 18 months later, was a group of songs that set the past and the present against each other in a way that also opened up new ways of thinking — in this case, concerning what William Blake called “the lineaments of gratified desire.”“Folly” both fits into and challenges the tradition of Romantic lieder that Mehldau and I love so much. It sets a series of poems in a dizzying sequence of musical styles that reflect the shifting perspectives on desire opened up by each poem he sets: the delicate darkness of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose”; the classical horror of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”; the sly lubricious perversity of a sonnet by Bertolt Brecht so obscene that his estate will not allow it to be translated; the rollicking jocks of E. E. Cummings’s “The Boys,” set in the style of Supertramp “with Wurlitzer.” The cycle ends with an epilogue based on one of the great poetic expressions of the ambiguities and compromises of sexual relationships, W.H. Auden’s “Lullaby”: “Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm.”We performed the songs in recital with Schumann’s “Dichterliebe.” The pairing reinvigorated the weirdness and perversity of a piece from the 19th century so familiar as to be in danger of losing its edge. Mehldau’s cycle can also be shocking, but, as in the Schumann, to dramatic effect; juxtapositions of violence and serenity intensify our engagement with the mysterious movements of text and music. When a tiny motif from the first Blake setting reoccurs in the last — “What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? / Or Wisdom for a dance in the street?” — we are moved, even if we hardly know why.In the end we decided to complete our recording with the jazz encores we had performed over the years, rather than with the Schumann. But hearing these standards — “These Foolish Things,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day” — set against Mehldau’s cycle also opens them up to questioning.“The Folly of Desire” explores different identities through text and music, some rebarbative and some consolatory, and in doing so shines a light on our experience of desire — its capacity for mindless destruction, its sublime creativity, its sheer idiocy. Folly indeed. As Mehldau writes in a composer’s note, it was written in a period when desire and its dangers were very much at the fore of public discourse, as #MeToo forced everyone to come to terms with the troubled issue of consent.But the piece is, as Mehldau says, “untouched by prosaic discourse.” Like other great works of the classical tradition, it allows us to inhabit other personas, other worlds. And it offers no answers, doing what art does in that spirit of negative capability, which Keats so perfectly encapsulated: to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Maestra’ Shows the Power of Women on the Concert Podium

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      The director of “Maestra,” Maggie Contreras, discusses making the documentary and the challenges faced by women in classical music.“Girls can’t do that.”That’s what 9-year-old Marin Alsop was told by her violin teacher when she expressed interest in a conducting career. Today, she’s one of the world’s best-known conductors, and she remembers that exchange in a scene from “Maestra,” a documentary directed by Maggie Contreras that’s premiering at the Tribeca Festival, which runs Wednesday to June 18 in New York City.The documentary spotlights a profession — conducting — which historically has all but excluded women. It tracks five candidates vying for the top prize in La Maestra, a female conducting competition co-founded in 2019 by the French conductor Claire Gibault, and held in Paris every two years.In the film, Ms. Contreras, 39, a documentary producer making her directorial debut, delivers an up-close-and-personal portrayal of the contestants as they rev up for a competition whose judges include Ms. Alsop and Ms. Gibault. The five contestants profiled in the film were from France, Germany, the United States, Greece and Poland.In a recent video interview, Ms. Contreras recalled the making of the movie and the challenges faced by women on the concert podium. The following interview has been edited and condensed.How did you find out about La Maestra?During the pandemic, on National Public Radio — where I get a lot of my ideas. My fellow producer Neil Berkeley heard it as well, and said, ‘Do you think you should direct this one?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ It made perfect sense. The classical music world is a world I’ve been tangentially tied to.The conductor Zoe Zeniodi is shown in the documentary eating a boiled egg in the tiny kitchen of an Airbnb in Albuquerque. The filmmaker believes the scene will shatter preconceived notions about the profession.How so?I grew up with classical music in my house at all times. Pop music was not something my family listened to. For better or for worse, I wasn’t exposed to what was on the radio.Growing up in Tucson, Ariz., whenever there was a free concert of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra in the park, my mom would make sure we went. My head was in the pit, wanting to talk to the timpani player. The Boston Pops was a concert series on PBS when I was growing up, and I was obsessed with the conductor John Williams. When you asked me as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, John Williams was my answer. I would wave the wooden spoon wanting to be him. I didn’t have a Marin Alsop to name.What was it like raising money for your documentary?Everyone was always excited about this film. They loved it from the moment they pressed play on our teaser. But there was always this barrier to committing. We almost stopped production twice, and didn’t have the financing to go to Paris until about three and a half weeks before the competition. In that time, we pulled together a 16-person crew to follow those women around.Our film is a microcosm of what society needs to be. Throughout the process of making this film, men in privileged positions said: “Hey, you should do this.” David Letterman gave us our first amount of money. He happens to be a classical music fan who wants to use his money to make things that are good for the world. The man who is now the executive producer is a banker in Washington, D.C.How did you choose the five women?I chose them out of 14, somewhat haphazardly, because the pandemic was on and I couldn’t go to all countries. I am a firm believer that if you put anyone under the microscope of a lens, they are going to be interesting. You’re going to find a story about them.How important was it that you were a woman making this movie?I don’t think I’m ever going to be the filmmaker who chases social issues. The feminist themes that are critical to this story and critical to our societal conversations are a byproduct of audiences being sucked in by the story, of being superentertained.Could a man have directed this, persuaded the five women to open up and express themselves as quickly as I was able to? I would question that, and would like to think not. This is why representation is so important when it comes to nonfiction storytelling. There was a sense of safety. I was sitting there with a camera in people’s bedrooms while they slept.In one of my favorite scenes, you see the conductor Zoe Zeniodi in the tiny little kitchen of a crummy Airbnb in Albuquerque eating a boiled egg. There are these preconceived notions about what a conductor’s life looks like, and the reality is the exact opposite. Conductors are eating boiled eggs in a very inexpensive Airbnb.Maggie Contreras, a documentary producer whose film “Maestra” is her first venture into directing.Ryan MusickHow did it feel to shine the spotlight on one of the most sexist artistic professions of all?When I was first pitching this project, my attitude toward it was: I am reluctantly telling a story about yet another glass ceiling that needs to be broken. The concept of having to break glass ceilings in 2023 is boring to me. I don’t want to have to be telling these stories, but they’re there to be told. I hope I never have to tell another one.Your movie is more about women than about female music makers. Why?Because if I need to fight against this world that isn’t accessible in the first place — if someone is going to say, “I’m not too sure my viewership is going to be into classical music” — then I have to make it as accessible as possible.It was very important for me to strip down the stereotypes of what a conductor is: the image of that authoritarian character belittling the musicians, who are quaking in fear and reverence. Women are not only having to step into that role, but also having to figure out how to get rid of that stereotype.What would you like your film to achieve?I want people to hire these women. I want all five of these women to not stop working. And I’m hoping that people can walk away from the film with the ability to answer the question: “What does a conductor do, anyway?”For me, I hope that people now see me as an individual artist, instead of a producer in relation to other artists. I hope my next film will not be as difficult to finance as this one: that for the next story that I want to tell, I’ll have the support behind me, because now I’m not a first-time director anymore. More

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      Kaija Saariaho: 11 Essential Works

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      This poetic composer, who died on Friday, wrote indelible, simmering operas, concertos, orchestral explosions, choral meditations and solos.Kaija Saariaho, the poetic and powerful composer who died on Friday at 70, was also subtle and suggestive with words.“Dazzling, different surfaces, tissues, textures,” she wrote of an early work, in language that could describe her style over 40 years. “Weights, gravity. To be blinded. Interpolations. Reflections. Death. The sum of independent worlds. Shading, refracting the color.”Her music shivers and glimmers but never lacks forcefulness; lush and often ominous, veiled in dark mystery, her pieces evolve with the muscular sinuousness of snakes. Her scores can evoke the glint and glare of staring at the sun — its beauty, its harshness, its burning afterimage — but also the slowly dizzying churn of the depths of the sea.Saariaho’s preoccupations were clear almost from the beginning of her career until its far too early end: guiding electronic and acoustic instruments into fresh alchemies of color, light and mass; the creation of seething stillness; the swiftness with which seeming solidity collapses into nothingness. Here are 11 works that offer an introduction to her seductive, if sometimes forbidding, world.‘Verblendungen’ (1984)Trained as a strict serialist, Saariaho was exposed in the early 1980s to the sonic haze of spectralist composers like Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey. This, coupled with her time at Ircam, the French institute of electronic music, pulled her from her early musical path toward an exploration of the relationship between acoustic instruments and electronic sounds, sometimes taped and sometimes produced live. In “Verblendungen” (a complex word that means, among other things, “delusions”), taped sounds and a live ensemble together take a journey of gradual dissolution from crushing density to spare, quivering particles.‘Du Cristal’ (1989)Half of a linked pair of pieces (with “ … à la Fumée”) for large orchestra — her entry into composing for grand symphonic forces — “Du Cristal” also has a crucial part for synthesizer, though Saariaho integrates the electronic and the acoustic into a single, shifting, dangerous mass. Strands of solo instruments emerge from a billowing cloud of sound, poised between meditation and violence.‘Graal Théâtre’ (1994)The rare Saariaho work not to include an electronic component, “Graal Théâtre” (“Grail Theater”) is a haunting violin concerto in an exuberantly virtuosic mode — its calligraphic solo line darting, at the start, amid bells and soft droning that shifts in and out of focus. Near the end, the accompaniment explodes before leaving the violinist alone in the final moments.‘Miranda’s Lament’ (1997)Before her first opera, Saariaho ventured into writing for voice, including setting texts from “The Tempest” — among them Miranda’s plea to her father, Prospero, to calm the storm he has created. The chamber instrumentation is intimate and graceful, and the soprano’s line is both expressively pained and plainly lovely, with a combination that long fascinated this composer: contemporary colors mixed with the deceptively simple formality of medieval and Renaissance song.‘Oltra Mar’ (1999)As sensual as Saariaho’s music gets, the chorus’s sound in this seven-part, 22-minute work hovers like bars of light, the edges smokily blurred. The mood is otherworldly; the subject is journeys, which feel more existential than physical. Electronic sounds rumble in “Memory of Waves”; death, the theme of the penultimate section, is followed by the hypnotic unfolding of “Arrival.”‘L’Amour de Loin’ (2000)For her first opera, Saariaho, working with the writer Amin Maalouf, created a stylized vision of the life of the 12th-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel, who falls in love with a countess he’s never met. Luxuriant contemplation reigns; there is little plot, but passion surges in the restraint, with tastes of medieval harmonies and North African rhythms.‘Sept Papillons’ (2000)For all her skill at handling large ensembles, Saariaho’s solos — including this set of miniatures for cello — have a special focus and freedom, a human rather than mythic scale. And, as with Bach’s cello music, almost ceaseless motion here has the uncanny, unexpected effect of encouraging reflection.‘Aile du Songe’ (2001)

      Few contemporary composers have devoted as much energy as Saariaho did to writing for the flute, which she mined for its keening eloquence, its reverberations of the primitive and its human connection: the ever-audible breath. This concerto wanders, dreamlike, fluttering and — in the second part — dancing, its energy infectious.‘Orion’ (2002)A majestic use of a sprawling orchestra, complete with organ, this piece — inspired by the hunter of Greek mythology and the constellation that shares his name — begins as a moody nocturne before boiling over into pummeling fury. “Winter Sky,” the second part, is as expansive as its title, with the trembling of infinite stars; and “Hunter,” the finale, is a ferocious dash.‘D’om le Vrai Sens’ (2010)Saariaho was inspired by a cycle of medieval tapestries to write a clarinet concerto — one that asks its soloist to move around the performance space — structured enigmatically according to the five senses: the kaleidoscopic colors of “Hearing”; “Sight” woozy and wailing; “Smell” simmering; “Touch” alert and as bright as Saariaho’s music gets; “Taste” unsettled and grumbling. The sixth section, the title of which translates roughly to “According to my desire alone,” is one of the spookiest and most beautiful pieces in her body of work, a quietly disorienting cave full of otherworldly calls and responses.‘Innocence’ (2018)Written before the pandemic, which caused its premiere to be delayed until 2021, “Innocence” is as densely plotted as “L’Amour de Loin” was spare. The stark yet sensitive story of a shooting at an international school, and its echoes years later, the score is Saariaho’s masterpiece, confidently guiding the desperate mood in a mixture of singing, speaking (in seven languages) and eerie Finnish folk chant. All these disparate vocal worlds are linked by the orchestra, which wraps around the singers lightly and sleekly — never explicitly underlining them, never competing. More

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      Kaija Saariaho, Pathbreaking Composer, Is Dead at 70

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      She brought new colors to modernist music, sometimes using electronics, and became the first female living composer to have two operas staged by the Met.Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who was brought up in the world of male-dominated high modernism but who broke away to forge an identity of her own, becoming the first woman to have more than one work of hers staged by the Metropolitan Opera, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, said her publisher, Chester Music, which confirmed the death.Ms. Saariaho brought new and often mysterious colors to classical music.In Paris, where she had settled permanently, she experimented with tape and live electronics, which she applied to nearly every form in classical music: works for solo instrument and small ensemble, and for symphony orchestra and opera. Over the years she rose to the top of her field, a slow-changing industry that only in recent years has made steps to correct the repertoire’s gender imbalances.Her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2000 and came to the Met in 2016, won the Grawemeyer Award for music composition. Her most recent entry into that genre, “Innocence,” debuted at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2021 and will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season.When the Met joined the work’s list of commissioners, Ms. Saariaho in turn joined a select group of living composers to have a second opera mounted by that house — and the only woman to gain that distinction.Kaija Saariaho was born on Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki. She studied at the storied Sibelius Academy there, and was a pioneering impresario of contemporary music, forming the group Open Ears with fellow young artists. She left to continue her education in Freiburg, Germany, with summer courses taken in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. She moved to Paris in 1982 to finish her studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by Pierre Boulez.A complete obituary will appear soon. More

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      Review: Julia Wolfe’s ‘unEarth’ Is Crowded Out by Multimedia

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      Not for the first time this season at the New York Philharmonic, a premiere was muddled by obvious, sometimes intrusive video art.Since moving back into David Geffen Hall this season, the New York Philharmonic has tried to use its newly renovated, technologically adept space to give extra multimedia glamour to a few premieres.Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill” opened the season in October, and dealt directly with the midcentury displacement of economically vulnerable populations on the blocks that became Lincoln Center. “The March to Liberation,” a program in March featuring the music of Black composers, was accompanied by video art.On both occasions, I felt that the multimedia — however sensitively rendered — undercut my experience of the music. During “San Juan Hill,” Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, would be building a real rapport, and momentum, with Charles’s group Creole Soul; but then there would be a pause for a lengthy new interjection of video commentary. And a new work by Courtney Bryan during “The March to Liberation” was so transporting, I at times found myself closing my eyes to avoid having my experience filtered so strongly through the lens of another artist.I felt the need to close my eyes again on Thursday, when van Zweden led the Philharmonic in another buzzy premiere that showed off the multimedia capabilities of Geffen Hall. It happened during the imaginative second movement of Julia Wolfe’s “unEarth” — the latest in her recent series of oratorio-like protest efforts, which served as the opening of two weeks of ecologically minded programming.During that second movement, Wolfe — a Pulitzer Prize winner and a founder of the influential Bang on a Can collective — amasses a powerful mix of sonorities: chattering, antiphonal choral music (often heard uttering the word “tree” in different languages); percussion indebted to gamelan tradition; punchy orchestral writing; intense electric guitar lines that, as played by her regular collaborator Mark Stewart, were biting but not too imitative of rock styles.After the solemn choral writing in the first movement — which drew on the combined talents of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and male singers from the Crossing — this mix of sounds was a welcome transition. The writing for Stewart’s guitar was a reminder of the muscular verve heard in the “Breaker Boys” movement from Wolfe’s “Anthracite Fields” (2014), for which she won that Pulitzer. And in moving from dry orchestral ruffling to powerful tutti riffing, this section of “unEarth” also recalled the “Factory” movement of her “Fire in my mouth” (2019), which the Philharmonic premiered and memorably recorded.When the soprano Else Torp entered — with beaming, stratospheric straight-tone singing that quoted Emily Dickinson’s “Who robbed the woods” — this movement of Wolfe’s piece proved delightfully, consistently weird. But it was a weirdness in service of dramatically clear ends, since the whole thing worked as a sonic commentary on the wonders of biodiversity.The piece was designed for both amplified and acoustic sounds, which van Zweden kept in balance. The animated projections that accompanied “unEarth,” however, were far less imaginative than the score; the video played instead like a slideshow of each language’s word for “tree,” along with some local arboreal information at the margins. The music was an impassioned litany; the multimedia amounted to a listicle.When a stage director (Anne Kauffman), projection designer (Lucy Mackinnon), two animators and four video technicians are listed in the program — while soloists like Stewart and the electric bassist Gregg August are not — that’s another sign that the multimedia urge has transgressed a bit much on the Philharmonic’s presentation of, you know, music.This same literalism of the video art held sway, in sound and image, during the third and final movement of “unEarth,” in which Wolfe sets some texts contributed by the younger singers to droning yet anxious music. Here, the projections — portraits similar to screen tests, featuring members of the Young People’s Chorus — were of a piece with the music: serious, but a bit too obvious to be moving.The entire concert was something of a muddle, down to the random-seeming pairing of “unEarth” with Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, in which the solo part’s difficulty was often audible in the account by Frank Huang, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster.Next week’s program seems to be on firmer conceptual footing, though. The orchestra will present Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes From ‘Peter Grimes,’” Toru Takemitsu’s “I hear the water dreaming” and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s majestic “Become Desert.”Most important: On those nights, the focus will be entirely on the music.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The Composer Julia Wolfe Focuses on Climate in ‘unEarth’

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      Julia Wolfe’s latest in a series of increasingly political, oratorio-like works, “unEarth,” premieres this week at the New York Philharmonic.Julia Wolfe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of Bang on a Can, has a way with words.In “Anthracite Fields,” the coal-dark highlight of a series of folklike, oratorio-adjacent works in which Wolfe, 64, has been putting American injustices under her unsparing sonic microscope, she lists the men named John with single-syllable surnames who can be found on an index of Pennsylvania mining accidents — a litany hundreds of Johns long.Her memorial to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, “Fire in my mouth,” concludes with an ethereal incantation of the 146 workers who died, their names drifting in sound, as if into the smoke of history. “Her Story,” a reflection on women’s rights, quotes some of the choicest insults that were spat at suffragists a century ago, as if to ask whether they sound familiar today.Now comes “unEarth,” a confrontation with climate change that premieres on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic, with Jaap van Zweden leading the soprano Else Torp, the men of the Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, in a staging by the director Anne Kauffman. It starts, and ends, with words sung by the children who helped write them.Wolfe’s “Fire in my mouth” at David Geffen Hall in 2019.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times“Of course, it’s so important for everyone but particularly poignant for younger people,” Wolfe said of the climate crisis in a recent interview. “A lot of the leadership right now, a lot of the feisty leadership is coming from young people, particularly from young women.”The texts that Wolfe uses in “unEarth” have a sense of literary adventure familiar from her earlier oratorios. She read widely to research it, and noted the influence of such writers as Sami Grover, Peter Wohlleben and Elizabeth Kolbert, a friend. The libretto draws on Emily Dickinson and the book of Genesis; in the second movement of three, “Forest,” the word tree is translated into myriad languages, which she pounds into a celebration of all things arboreal, backed by conga drums.“She is always taking kernels of text that have a lot of resonance in the stories of the world we live in,” Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, said of Wolfe. “Honestly, at some point, you start to stop thinking about the words and you drift off into larger ideas.”Many of Wolfe’s compositions — another, an orchestral work called “Pretty,” will premiere at the Berlin Philharmonic next week, under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, a Wolfe admirer — have had political themes. But the larger ideas of “unEarth” are more directly delivered than those of any of her other socially conscious but primarily historical oratorios, dating back to “Steel Hammer” more than a decade ago.The impulse to speak plainly comes not just from the subject matter, but from Wolfe’s chosen collaborators. When she decided to involve the Young People’s Chorus in the work, as she had in “Fire,” she sought the input of its singers; she and Kauffman asked its conductors to lead the choristers in discussions about the climate crisis, and recorded them.“Something that I remember is everybody agreeing on this sense of urgency,” Ryoko Leyh, 16, said of the conversations she took part in. “Everybody was saying something like ‘I’m scared,’ or ‘I’m always thinking about it, it’s always on my mind and making me anxious.’ So I feel like we all had different ideas of what is actually going on and what we can do to stop climate change, but we all had that collective sense of dread.”The children of the chorus come from all kinds of educational backgrounds, said Francisco J. Núñez, its artistic director. For many of them, the discussions were a learning opportunity; some were as young as 8.“It really made me think on how impactful learning about climate change and global warming itself can be on the young population,” Irene Cunto, 12, said, “because at the end, we’ll be the ones that’s facing it.”Wolfe’s works in this vein have grown increasingly political. “I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” she said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”Amrita Stuetzle for The New York TimesThe process was instructive for Wolfe, too. She was amazed at the subtlety of the conversations, and decided to use parts of them in the piece. It begins with a quotation of one of the most junior participants, who saw global warming as “like a monster devouring the Earth.” The work ends with another quotation, this time of an older singer, as their phrase “hope requires action” is chanted like a mantra, before the chorus and the soprano demand that the audience “act,” with an insistent, if fearful and minor-key, final crescendo.“We just feel powerless because of this idea that we’ve inherited all these problems and now it’s our responsibility to fix everything,” Leyh said, pointing to the importance of the chorus singing words its members have written themselves. “It’s like we’re being given a platform that we don’t usually have, literally, to say what we want to say in a way that we know is going to be heard.”Making the Young People’s Chorus the voice of hope in “unEarth,” and ensuring that the audience would have to look at them “in the face,” as Wolfe put it, offered the composer something of a way through the dilemmas involved in creating explicitly political art, a challenge that climate-conscious composers are finding becomes more acute as catastrophes grow. Wolfe said that she was trying not to be too didactic, but that she was content with her solution in the final movement, “Fix It,” which lists a number of ways in which individuals can make a difference — Meatless Mondays, No Mow May — as well as broader policy concepts, like “reforestation” and “solarification.”“I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” Wolfe said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”The Philharmonic commissioned “unEarth” after the success of “Fire in my mouth” four years ago, and is presenting it on the first of two programs that make up “Earth,” a climate mini-festival. The second program, next week, includes the belated local premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” which debuted in Seattle five years ago.“In the end, music is about emotion,” said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, “and Julia is able to combine, in that way that we cannot quite explain, a combination of beauty and emotion. It carries an even stronger message as a result.”Each of Wolfe’s oratorios has offered a different answer to the question of where the balance of poetry and politics lies, though she sees a progression through them. “Anthracite Fields” was not exactly shy about its views — it sets a speech by John L. Lewis, the militant leader of the United Mine Workers — but, as one listener pointed out to her, it does not explicitly mention protest. “Fire,” partly as a consequence, has an entire, thumping movement called “Protest.” “Her Story” is more of an inquiry into change than an indictment of the past, but as Wolfe put it, “it’s a little sassier.”“UnEarth,” though, includes lines like “the house is on fire,” and “clean up your corporation.” It goes further, and with good reason.“The others were more reflective. ‘Who were we?’ ‘Who are we?’” Wolfe said. “And this is like: ‘Guess what. We have to do something.’” More

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      Lincoln Center Names Conductor for Reimagined Mostly Mozart

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      Jonathon Heyward will succeed Louis Langrée as music director of the center’s revered summer ensemble.Jonathon Heyward, the rising young conductor who this fall will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has been tapped to lead Lincoln Center’s summer ensemble, a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the center announced on Wednesday.Heyward, 30, will start a three-year contract with Lincoln Center next year. His appointment is part of the center’s changes to the revered Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, by giving it a new name, embracing a wider variety of genres and bringing more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the stage.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston can fall in love with this music, then anyone can,” Heyward said in an interview. “It has everything to do with accessibility and presentation.”Heyward succeeds the orchestra’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, whose contract expires this year. During Langrée’s 21-year tenure, he has helped rejuvenate the ensemble and cement its reputation as an acclaimed interpreter of the music of Mozart and the Classical repertoire.“The orchestra musicians and I have developed a unique bond that I will treasure forever,” Langrée said in a statement. “I wish Jonathon as many joys as those I experienced during this extraordinary journey.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some complaints from audience members, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music — which was once a fixture of the season and festivals there, but has been reduced significantly.Since the pandemic, the future of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, established in 1973, has been uncertain. The festival whose name it bears — once one of Lincoln Center’s premier summertime events — no longer exists. In its place is “Summer for the City,” featuring a wider variety of genres, including pop music, social dance and comedy.Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said that the rethinking of Mostly Mozart was aimed at “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone.”“It’s a necessary evolution,” she said. “This is an orchestra that I think has a big place in the hearts and minds of New York City, and we want to keep it that way.”The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will get a new name when Heyward takes the podium next year. Thake said that its longtime moniker felt “a little myopic right now.”“We’d love to just open up that conversation and have this orchestra be something more than just one composer, or mostly anything,” she said.The center and the orchestra are negotiating a new contract — the previous agreement expired in February — and discussing issues including auditions, the process for hiring substitutes, diversifying the ranks of the ensemble and promoting community engagement.Heyward, who made his Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra debut last year and will return this summer, said that he would work to broaden the ensemble’s repertoire, including by programming more works by contemporary composers. He mentioned Hannah Kendall, a friend, as an example of an artist he was eager to explore.“We have to continue the lineage and the storytelling of today in order to really grow the art form,” he said.Heyward said he would also seek to preserve the ensemble’s heritage. “I just don’t see that just completely disappearing overnight,” he said. “It won’t, simply.”“I don’t plan on just throwing out the Beethoven symphonies, the Schumann symphonies or Mozart,” he added. “That’s not the approach to take, and that’s not what I believe in.” More