Concert Review Visions and passions intersect in Kaija Saariaho’s Émilie concert series

Culture|Concert review

Classic

Tapiola Sinfonietta at the Espoo Cultural Center 17.12. Olari Elts, conductor, Katharine Dain, soprano. – Hilli, Saariaho, Haydn.

It’s night. Émilie is sitting Kaija Saariahon Émiliealone in his room at the French castle of Lunéville, fears dying in the impending birth, writes a letter to his last lover and the father of his child, and at the same time finishes the English Isaac Newton difficult to understand Principiatranslation work of the main work.

French Marquise Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) was an ingenious mathematician and physicist. Kaija Saariaho composed a monodrama about Émilie’s night, visions and bad ideas in 2009 Émilie, from which he edited a concert series of three songs and two interludes in 2011.

Saariaho’s music opens up a dazzling and dizzying view of the boundless theater of Émilie’s mind.

American-Dutchman soprano Katharine Dainin the radiant sound is played by ethereal beauty and dramatic power. The soloist was at the intersection of timelessness and the limitations of time, intellectual visions and bodily passions, ecstasy and pain.

Artistic partner of the Tapiola Sinfonietta Ryan Bancroftin after falling ill, an Estonian jumped in his place Olari Elts, who, as an experienced director of contemporary music, was certainly the right person to conjure up the orchestra ‘s stunning views of Saariaho’ s music. Elts led in a sophisticated, colorful and accurate manner.

I would like to uses the “giant flexible pudding” image of Saariaho’s music that physicists use to describe the universe today. Like space, Saariaho’s music bends, curves, flexes, twists.

It is as if it consists of space dust, ringing atoms, light signals, and gravitational waves, whose macrocosm is constantly changing its shape, prismatic colors, and dynamics.

The concert started in the closeness of nature to a young Finn To Sebastian Hill (b. 1990) Peach. The focus seemed to be on a body enjoying a hot summer day. Peach gave rise to sensations of touch and warmth. Its motifs and sounds sounded, rattled, screamed, blew and pounded various biorhythms. The melody painting is skillfully personal, intoxicated by the heat.

Feeling dizzy Émilien after stepping safely into the earth’s crust, Haydnin to the near-life microcosm of the Fourth Fourth Symphony in D major. How easy and fun it was to outline the themes, rhythms, chord expenses, developments, the characters of the parts and their emotional colors.

At the same time, Elts, who led energetically and enthusiastically, made sure that the Viennese classic trip did not lack a little taste of adventure.

Elts hit the witty certainly small harmonic and rhythmic surprises of the symphony.