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...

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