Saariaho: L’Amour de Loin (DVD)

World Premiere Recording

Composer: Kaija Saariaho
Conductor: Esa-Pekka Salonen

Performers:

Clémence, Countess de Tripoli: Dawn Upshaw
Jaufré Rudel, Prince de Blaye: Gerald Finley
Pilgrim: Monica Groop
Finnish National Opera Orchestra and Chorus,

Number of discs: 1
Studio: Philips / DG DVD B0004721-09
DVD Release Date: September 13, 2005
Run Time: 139 minutes
ASIN: B0009K1ZI2

What the critics say

The New York Times

“Best New Work of the Year 2000”

Saariaho’s haunting and beautifully colored score, while nodding to Debussy and Messiaen, is deeply personal and utterly accomplished”

Arlo McKinnon, Opera News, March 2006, vol 70 , no.9

L’Amour de Loin (The Distant Love), the first opera of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, had its premiere in 2000 at the Salzburg Festival. The text of this tragic story is based on the life and songs of the twelfth-century troubadour/crusader Jaufré Rudel. Rudel (Gerald Finley), jaded from years of revelrous debauchery, has become despondent. His spirits are revived by a Pilgrim (Monica Groop) who tells the troubadour about Clémence, the Countess of Tripoli (Dawn Upshaw), who becomes for Rudel an unseen ideal of beauty, nobility and purity. In the spirit of medieval verse, he composes songs in her honor, assuming he shall never meet his paragon. In turn, the Princess learns of Jaufré, and she too savors the dream of an idealized love.

The main source of disappointment in this production lies in Peter Sellars’s stage direction and design. Throughout five acts, the stage floor is immersed in ankle-deep water, with most action occurring on one or another of two spiral staircases — one for Rudel’s castle, one for Clémence’s. Between these is a boat. While the Pilgrim is in the water or the boat, the other two principals are mostly stranded on their respective staircases, creating an oppressively static atmosphere for this inward-looking, abstract opera.

Kaija Saariaho is a tremendously gifted composer, and the music she has created for the opera is wonderful. A student of the late and lamented Gerard Grisey, Saariaho has incorporated elements of the spectral school of music, a style which emphasizes timbres created by manipulations of higher frequencies in the harmonic series via computer analysis. This results in gorgeous melodic lines that often outline unusual inversions of seventh and ninth chords, creating a seductive, almost modal effect within a complex harmonic palette. Her mastery is most evident in her synthesis of Rudel’s musical idiom and Moorish music elements. The libretto, by Amin Maalouf, an eminent Lebanese writer, is less successful. In English translation, Maalouf’s first libretto has moments of poetry and charm but is plagued by frequent swerves toward the prosaic. The listener eventually tires of Jaufré’s complaining to the point of losing sympathy at the protagonist’s demise.

The high quality of the music itself, the occasional eloquence of the libretto and the sensational performances by all involved suggest that opera-lovers might be better advised to buy the audio recording. One hopes that L’Amour de Loin will receive a more effective and sympathetic staging at a later date, but it would be a pity to be deprived of this music.

From an article “Birth: A new opera from the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho” by Alex Ross for the New Yorker, 24 April 2006

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424crmu_music?currentPage=all

Saariaho never imagined herself an opera composer. But, after seeing Messiaen’s monumental sacred opera “St. Francis of Assisi” at the Salzburg Festival in 1992, she realized that she could engage the genre as slow-moving ritual rather than as event-packed drama. Eight years later, her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” or “The Distant Love,” was unveiled at Salzburg. It is based on a libretto by the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf, who, like the composer, is a longtime Paris resident. The story has the simple power of an ancient tale, which it is: Jaufré, a twelfth-century troubadour, falls in love with the idea of a far-off Tripoli countess and, after a long, dread-filled journey, dies in her arms. Saariaho’s music captures with magical immediacy the drastic emotions that swirl around this romance, which is different from standard operatic melodrama in that the action is largely psychological. There is a riveting DVD of a Finnish National Opera performance, with a beautifully restrained Peter Sellars production, roof-rattling orchestral sounds under Salonen’s direction, and great lead performances by Dawn Upshaw, Monica Groop, and Gerald Finley. Saariaho’s stroke of genius is to keep the melodic lines spare and direct amid the orchestral phantasmagoria; Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” is her vocal model. After watching the DVD, you may find yourself writing a letter to your local opera house, pleading for a production. This one is addressed to Peter Gelb, Metropolitan Opera.

FT Weekend Magazine – Critics’ Choice

Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 27 August 2005

Kaija Saariaho’s first opera (“Love from afar”) has won a cult following since its Salzburg premiere in 2000, partly due to its mystical plot but also because of the Finnish composer’s success at adapting the icy sensuousness of her idiom to the stage. The result is an operatic mirage: little happens but much is implied. The original production team, led by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Peter Sellars, regrouped last year in Helsinki to make this compelling DVD with a cast led by Gerald Finley and Dawn Upshaw.