Pianist Tuija Hakkila enjoyed a close friendship with composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) that lasted for over 40 years until the composer's death in 2023. Tuija Hakkila played a pivotal role in Saariaho's creations for the solo piano and harpsichord. Although Kaija Saariaho wrote several compositions featuring the piano, the composer felt that writing music for solo piano was particularly challenging due to the restrictions of the instrument. Although few in number, Saariaho's piano works are 21st century gems continuing the path set by Debussy's late works and Messiaen.

Finland has produced a remarkably significant musical output for a country of it's size, not the least of which is that of the contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho, whose ethereal compositio ns focus strongly on timbre and harmony.

Includes work(s) by Kaija Saariaho. Ensemble: Kronos Quartet.

Classical Music

One of the finest contemporary composers working today, the Parisian-based Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's flute chamber works are the spotlight here in a program of compositions that range from 1982-2012. Led by the tremendous flautist Camilla Hoitenga, this is a unique glimpse at one of the compelling composers of our day and also features guest musicians Anssi Karttunen (cello), Da Camera of Houston, Daniel Belcher (baritone) and H�lo�se Dautry (harp).

Classical Music

Jennifer Koh, a “brilliant violinist” (The New Yorker) who performs with “conviction, ferocity, and an irresistible sense of play” (Washington Post), showcases works by Kaija Saariaho, the visionary and influential Finnish composer with whom Koh has closely collaborated and feels a deep personal bond. The album offers the world-premiere recording of Saariaho’s Light and Matter for violin, cello, and piano, inspired by sunlit colors and shadows in a city park outside the composer’s window. Also receiving its first recording is the violin and cello version of Aure, meaning a gentle breeze, created for and dedicated to Koh and cellist Anssi Karttunen, another champion of Saariaho’s music. The album’s largest work is the one that first attracted Koh to the composer: the violin concerto Graal Théâtre, written for Gidon Kremer, which Koh has performed many times and performs here in the composer’s chamber-orchestra version. Grove Music Online notes that the work illustrates “Saariaho’s rich and expansive string style, but places greater emphasis on melody than earlier works.”

Tocar, Spanish for “to touch,” explores the playful and tactile aspects of the word through violin and piano. Cloud Trio for violin, viola, and cello was prompted by shape-shifting clouds in the French Alps. Saariaho X Koh is the violinist’s twelfth Cedille Records album in a discography that includes the Grammy-nominated String Poetic.

Ondine here presents a recording of chamber music by Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023). Known for her colourful orchestration, Saariaho’s impressive variety of sound is apparent in all of the works included here.

The trios are composed for different combinations of instruments, each of them demonstrating their individual colours.

Ondine has previously released the orchestral version of Mirage, and here presents the world première recording of the trio version. Musicians on this recording have performed Saariaho’s work for a number of years and display a striking affinity with her music.

The release also celebrated Kaija Saariaho’s 60th birthday (14th October 2012).

Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) is among the most prominent names in contemporary music scene today. This new album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu includes world première recordings of three works by Saariaho featuring bass-baritone Gerald Finley and harpist Xavier de Maistre as soloists. True Fire is a six-movement song cycle that was written to a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the NDR Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre National de France, for baritone Gerald Finley with an original idea to explore the scope of the baritone voice. The texts conclusively determined what the vocal expression would be like and how the details in the musical material would shape up. The disparate texts chosen by Saariaho in fact have a common underlying theme: the status of humankind surrounded by nature, our observations of it and our belonging to it. Saariaho’s orchestral triptych Orion (2002) is one of her most performed works. Orion as a celestial phenomenon is showcased in the middle movement, Winter Sky. In 2013, Saariaho rescored this movement for a smaller orchestra, and to distinguish it from the original she gave it a title in French with the same meaning, Ciel d’hiver. It joins the series of works by Saariaho that are in one way or another inspired by things in sky and space. Trans for harp and orchestra is the composer’s latest addition to a series of concertos. It was written to a joint commission from the Suntory Foundation for Arts, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, Radio France and the Hessen Radio Orchestra. The premiere was given by Xavier de Maistre in Tokyo in August 2016.

SAARIAHO Clarinet Concerto, “D’Om le vrai sens.” Laterna Magica. Leino Songs • Sakari Oramo, cond; Finnish RSO; Kari Kriikku, (cl); Anu Komsi (s) • ONDINE 1173-2 (67:31 Text and Translation)


Over the years my admiration for Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952) has only grown. From early in her career she’s had an identifiable voice, one that comes from the intersection of a certain Nordic directness with a very French taste for refinement of timbre and texture (she’s Finnish, but worked at IRCAM and has lived for decades in Paris). The result is music that pleases on multiple levels: It’s highly lyrical, explores new sonorities with experimental rigor, and is never afraid of sensuality.


The three works on this program (basically hot off the press) all partake of the above-described aesthetic. The Clarinet Concerto (2010) is a suite of six movements inspired by the famous medieval “Unicorn” tapestries at the Cluny Museum in Paris, which in turn represent the senses (the final movement evokes a culminatory “sixth sense”). It’s truly haunting, in that the clarinet often uses noise and multiphonics (though always scrupulously) to suggest a sort of ghost-like keening and shrieking. Saariaho is very much in the spectralist school, which develops its harmonic practice from precise analysis of sounds in their microscopic realm, and from their correspondence to the overtone series. As a result, even her most dissonant sound masses have a spaciousness that always sounds natural and open, and that’s the case throughout this piece.


Laterna Magica (2008) is a tone poem evoking the life and work of film director Ingmar Bergman, though it never falls into any film-music cliché. It has an interesting dialectic between rich clouds of sound and more rhythmically pulsating textures (film threading through a projector’s sprockets?), and a passage where the orchestral players whisper various words (in German) relating to light is particularly striking. It falls a little more into what feel to me certain standard gestures and sonorities of this style and era, but it remains consistently appealing and mysterious. And the 2007 Leino Songs are four settings from one of Finland’s greatest poets, Eino Leino (1878–1926). This is technically the most conservative work, in that the voice is used for a traditionally beautiful melody; the instruments provide an aura about it that sometimes is more distorted, but never at the expense of the vocal line’s beauty. All this is not a surprise, since the composer has established one of the few successful track records for innovative and beautiful opera.


All these are exceptional performances, but by now would we expect less from anything coming out of Finland, perhaps the world’s most advanced musical culture (at least for what we call “classical”)? If you’ve not heard Saariaho before, this is an excellent introduction.


FANFARE: Robert Carl


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Susanna Välimäki’s booklet notes sum up the music of Kaija Saariaho remarkably succinctly: “Saariaho may be regarded as a philosophical composer of mysteries … her music seems to suggest an invisible yet tangible ‘other world’ that can be sensed in the translucent sonorities, echoes, overtones, harmonics, shadow tones and reflections of her music ... [It] conjures up a sense of infinite space and multimodality.” The colours of the orchestration in a work like the Clarinet Concerto are almost as elusive as the tonalities and harmonic language used, but at the same time the ear is granted access into a world which is infinitely fascinating - subsumed at times with an icy northern chill, but also irrigated by the magnetic shifting patterns of an aurora borealis.

As the subtitle suggests, the Clarinet Concerto “D’OM LE VRAI SENS” refers to the human senses, each inspired by the panels of a medieval tapestry called The Lady and the Unicorn. These physical aspects are suggested with instrumental symbolism and meditations rather than literal descriptive elements easily divined by an audience, but the atmosphere of mystic other-worldliness brings us into a state of wonder which can perhaps be interpreted as comparable with that of the medieval lay person confronted by inexplicable worlds beyond experience, expressed by an almost equally inexplicable miracle of craftsmanship in the tapestries. Kari Kriikku’s remarkable clarinet playing is a real treat in this work, sometimes imitating animal sounds, at times sounding like declamatory speech, and always filled with drama and intensity which equals that conjured by the entire orchestra.

Laterna Magica is titled after the memoirs of film director Ingmar Bergman, and refers to the earliest of image projectors, the magic lantern. This transfers into music in a series of ‘mirages in sound‘, creating spaces into which the imagination can project its own images. This again is more than a merely literal conjuring and teasing of our pictorial senses, and the mystic symbolism of passing time and the universal questions of existence are powerful elements in the score. Machine-like noises and quasi-spoken whisperings express the intangibility of images which seem real, and challenge perceptions of permanency and reality.

The Leino Songs use poems by Eino Leino, considered one of the most important of all Finnish poets. Reading the texts in the booklet, and it is immediately apparent as to why these texts would appeal to Saariaho, as their themes and content can easily be interpreted as expressing the very essence of her compositions. Beautifully sung by Anu Komsi, each song is compact, the words used directly and without distortion of the original poem. Each song creates its own world, reflecting the themes of love and violence, fragrant serenity and death.

This is a superbly produced recording from the Ondine label, which has been championing Saariaho’s music for some time now. Justly celebrated as one of the leading composers of our time, this varied and deeply fascinating programme is as good a place as any to become acquainted with her remarkable universe of expressive sonority and mystical depth. This isn’t Bach or Beethoven of course, but neither is it work which will turn you off with impenetrable intellectual challenges. The deeper you look the more you can reveal, but what you find is more often one or other revelation about yourself as much as an understanding of music which is of its very nature a kind of tuning fork held up to the harmonies and dissonances of existence.

-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

Ondine releases the long-awaited second instalment of Kaija Saariaho’s (b. 1958) chamber works with the award-winning Meta4 string quartet. The recording also includes three chamber music songs together with soprano Pia Freund. Kaija Saariaho (b. 1958) is one of the most important Finnish contemporary composers. She is equally known for her operas, the oratorio La Passion de Simone, orchestral works and concertos and also for rich small-scale works. Saariaho’s instrumental style is particularly richly manifested in her works for strings, where she makes use of a variety of playing techniques.

Helsinki–born Parisian Kaija Saariaho’s music sounds like little else, its kaleidoscopic magic evoking Debussy refracted into the twenty-first century. This album includes the ghostly Terra memoria for string orchestra, expanded from a chamber original for the Emerson String Quartet. The beautifully scored vocal suite from Emilie, a 2011 one-woman opera about pioneering eighteenth-century scientist Emilie du Châtelet, will appeal to those beguiled by Saariaho’s dazzling first opera, L’Amour de loin (the works share a librettist, too, French-Lebanese poet Amin Maalouf). One can’t imagine the high-flying vocal role’s originator, Finnish diva Karita Mattila, being much better than French soprano Karen Vourc’h is here, nor in the shimmering song cycle Quatre Instants, also written for Mattila.

– Bradley Bambarger, Listen Magazine

This is the first of two releases of Chamber Works for Strings by Kaija Saariaho, and also a tribute to the composer Kaija Saariaho who turned 60 on 14th of October 2012. Saariaho is renowned across the world for her vivid orchestration. Her chamber works highlight her ability to create unique sound worlds with only a few instruments. Here she also adds live electronics to create a unique colour.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

SAARIAHO La Passion de Simone • Esa-Pekka Salonen, cond; Dawn Upshaw (sop); Tapiola CCh; Finnish RSO • ONDINE 1217 (SACD: 66:32 Text and Translation) Live: Helsinki 10/19–20/2012


La passion de Simone is a one-person oratorio by Kaija Saariaho based on the writings of philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). Unlike many assimilated Jews from Europe, Weil was lucky enough to be able to escape Nazi-occupied France and left for New York. Later she moved to London, where she worked from across the channel with the French Resistance, but died of tuberculosis in 1943, largely by refusing food or treatment. Although Weil was a German Jew, the text of this work is in French. The text, though including quotes from Weil, is as much a commentary on her life and work written for the composer by Armin Maalout.


I was deeply impressed with both the seriousness and textural beauty of Saariaho’s music. She creates an almost prismatic web of sound that underlines the solo and choral writing like a low-lying mushroom cloud; even when the music gets busy, as in the “Second Station,” the wind and brass figures seem subjugated to the overall ambience of the orchestral sound. Indeed, the chorus often seems to be a part of the orchestra, not something external or independent of it.


No one would ever claim that the solo vocal writing is tonal or melodic in the strict sense of the words, but as a friend of mine likes to say, the music does “begin.” There is a definite directionality to its progression. He and other listeners attuned only to tonality, however, may not appreciate the dark shards of brass playing tone clusters that interrupt the musical flow here and there, but I found it intensely interesting. Moreover, Saariaho has the gift of being able to match the music to the mood of the text, even though I personally felt that the words of the “Third Station” do not entirely evoke nightmarish brass explosions. The text here is:


Another person would have


Turned away from the world


To care for his own suffering.


You turned away from yourself


To fix your gaze upon the world.


Over the years, soprano Dawn Upshaw’s voice—never entirely steady to begin with—has become even more fluttery in tonal emission and a bit thin in sound, but her musicality and phrasing are beyond question. More importantly, Salonen’s conducting—so very familiar to American listeners from his years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (where he is still Conductor Laureate)—is simply magnificent, leaving no detail unattended to in his progression from beginning to end. He even manages to find rhythmic cells within this largely amorphous music that help propel it and give it forward momentum, a task I do not envy him in. In the very busy Fifth and Sixth Stations, for instance, the music becomes exceedingly busy, with a battery of percussion driving the brass, wind, and string figures as well as chorus, which is now separate in sound from the orchestra. Salonen finds exactly the right mood and tempo for this, which then blends into the Sixth Station where the percussion moves away temporarily and the stabbing brass is confined to occasional chords, driving a sonic wedge between voices and instruments. I should also mention that every so often, certain lines are spoken (actually whispered) rather than sung. At first I thought it was Upshaw, since no one else is credited on the CD back insert, but in small print on the first page of the booklet, Dominique Blanc is credited as speaker.


By Stations 13 and 14, which discuss Weil’s illness and death, the orchestra all but falls away as the (whispering) speaker and singer dominate the proceedings. Only in the 15th and “Final Station” does the orchestra return in full force, summing up the piece musically as the text sums it up dramatically “By your death, everything that you had said/Was transformed into a testament/You walked towards your own annihilation/And you won a resurrection.”


It isn’t often that I say anything about SACD sonics (particularly in solo piano or chamber music) because I don’t have an SACD player, but in this case the sound is absolutely fantastic. Even on a conventional CD player (and this may be due as much to Salonen’s conducting as to the recorded sound), the orchestra and chorus seem to “spread out” and envelop you from the very first note, and this feeling never leaves you at any point throughout the cantata. Thus I simply must give big kudos to the recording engineers, Antti Pohjola and Enno Mäemets, the latter of whom also did the sound mixing. Not only did they capture the full ambience of Saariaho’s sound world, but they also managed not to blur the orchestral details when it was important for the inner voices to be heard. You really feel that you are sitting in the hall where this piece is being performed and recorded as you listen to it; in many places, the sound is so rich that it is almost tactile—you almost feel that you can reach out and touch it.


On the last page of the booklet, it says that La passion de Simone originally premiered as a stage work directed by Peter Sellars. I can only pray that he didn’t do to it what he did to conventional opera 30 years ago, which is to ruin it, but since it included choreography (by Luca Veggetti) my fears are compounded. Why the heck would anyone dance to this music or, even worse, to these lyrics? How do you dance through a life of misery, selflessness to others, and a personal search for spirituality in a dark and ugly world? More importantly, why would you dance this? But no matter. Although it is noted that this recording “was made in connection with this live concert performance,” the medium of a CD happily spares us these unnecessary images except for the photos on the cover and CD inlay. We are, then, happily free to imagine the music and words as separate entities, which indeed they are, and to marvel at the skill that Saariaho used in creating this marvelous work.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), featured in 2017 at Radio France's Festival Presences of contemporary music, was a central figure in a generation of internationally renowned Finnish composers and performers.

Kaija Saariaho developed computer-assisted composition techniques and mastered working with tape and live electronics, but she also encountered French composers of so-called spectral music, whose techniques are based on computer analysis of the sound spectrum of individual notes on different instruments.
In the profusion of works that Saariaho has produced in recent years, two features have marked her entire career. One is the close collaboration with other artists –writers, directors, musicians, etc.– in the creation of new works. The other is the concern to make her music, not the treatment of an abstract process, but an urgent sharing of ideas, images and emotions from the composer to the listener.

This collection is the recording echo of the Festival Presences (created in 1991) and its commissioning and creation activities, supported by Radio France's musical ensembles.