Kaija Saariaho is the first woman to win the Wihuri Sibelius Prize

By Vesa Sirén
     
      She was first again...
      In a ceremony that took place on October 9th, Finnish contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho, 57, was awarded the prestigious Wihuri Sibelius Prize, which carries with it a cash award of EUR 100,000.
     
The Sibelius Prize is one of the world’s most significant music prizes, awarded to prominent composers who have become internationally known and acknowledged.
      Kaija Saariaho was the first woman to win this award.
      For Saariaho, there is actually nothing particularly new about firsts or big cash awards.
      In 2002, she was granted the Grawemeyer Award, worth EUR 170,000.
      Moreover, the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition in 2008 and the Rolf Schock Prize in 2001 also both included cash awards in the several tens of thousands of euros.
     
Saariaho does not even remember all the prizes she has picked up.
      However, the two previous awards were used to buy a new apartment in Paris.
      After winning the Sibelius Prize, Saariaho bought a new Steinway grand piano.
      Success has not changed her.
      ”In the 1970s, Kaija Saariaho was a tall shy novice composer interested in the visual arts, and today she is exactly the same, except she's no longer a novice but an internationally known name”, says composer Eero Hämenniemi, Saariaho’s fellow-student.
     
Kaija Saariaho attended the Steiner School and took guitar, piano, and violin lessons. The sounds were strongly associatedin the child's mind with "colours" and textures".
      She believed and still believes that there are ”more connections between the various senses than we are conscious of”.
      For a year, Saariaho was married to an architect, then she dated illustrator and graphic designer Olli Lyytikäinen while also studying visual arts, until she started studying at the Sibelius Academy as a student composer under the guidance of Paavo Heininen.
      ”Her special strengths were aesthetic intuition and will”, Heininen says.
      ”The will alone is not enough; one has to study as well. She had set herself certain quality targets, knowing precisely what is not adequate and what would not do”, Heininen adds.
     
The analysis of new music was not one of the subjects on the curriculum at the Sibelius Academy, which is why Saariaho, Hämeenniemi, Magnus Lindberg, and some others studied among themselves, preferably in Saariaho’s spacious student pad.
      The mutual discipline was strict, and Saariaho got on well with the boys, Hämeenniemi recalls.
      ”Her mode of expression was gentle and unassuming, but she has always had tremendous intensity, regardless of what she has done. The underlying factors behind her intensity are a steely will and dogged devotion to the purpose she has set her sights on”, Hämeenniemi continues.
     
Saariaho found her own voice in her work titled Laconisme de l’aile in 1982.
      She was interested in the pliable interface between noise and sound. How a voice can turn into a flageolet note and back. How a sound changes ”from crystal into smoke”. How acoustic music and electronics are combined.
      Even small changes in tone sounded big to her.
      ”An endless sequence of electronic noise”, scoffed the late Seppo Heikinheimo, a music critic at Helsingin Sanomat, in 1983. He declared that there was "nothing of any interest going on in there".
      He was allowed to think so, but is it possible that a little bit of chauvinism was also involved?
      ”Few people would listen to Saariaho’s music if she happened to be ugly and fat”, Heikinheimo contemplated later.
     
Saariaho finished her studies in Freiburg, honing her skills at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris.
      In 1984 Saariaho married Jean-Baptiste Barrière, and in the same year she got her international breakthrough with her orchestral composition Verblendungen.
      Soon afterwards, the French Ministry of Culture commisioned Lichtbogen, for nine musicians and live electronics. In this work Saariaho learned how to create harmonic processes.
      One of her key works, Nymphéa, was written for the Kronos Quartet and premiered in 1987. The composer’s work Du cristal was then performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen in 1989.
      When she composed more works for orchestra, her works became ”more intelligible”, and maybe even more theatrical. ”Astonishing progress”, admitted the famously curmudgeonly Heikinheimo.
      An introvert had turned into an extrovert - in terms of her music, I suggest to Saariaho. However, Saariaho herself spurns the idea.
      Kaija Saariaho regards herself as an uncommunicative person who just puts notes in their right places in her study.
     
Saariaho’s path towards opera opened up through gradually larger forms and exploration of the human voice, and in 2000 she hit the jackpot with her first opera L’Amour de loin in Salzburg.
      The New York Times called it the best opera for many years.
      The staging was directed by Peter Sellars, and the production continued to Santa Fe, Paris, and Helsinki. At present the number of separate productions is eight, including one by the English National Opera at The Coliseum in London earlier this year.
     
Things were starting to happen in a big way, but Saariaho’s progress caused a counterreaction. Many people found the opera "too static".
      Avantgardists think that Saariaho ”betrayed” them or "sold out" by turning to medieval troubadour singing.
      String players, including the musicians of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, were amazed and puzzled at her endless streams of flageolet notes. Saariaho replied that the use of such notes was her speciality. She passed the test.
     
As a dramatic composer, Saariaho’s greatest accomplishment is not her opera Adriana Mater, which explores the issues of war, rape, and forgiveness.
      The Paris première of that opera from 2006 was delayed by a week because of a strike, but it has since been performed successfully in Helsinki and in the UK and the United States.
      Neither is the long and heavy oratorio La Passion de Simone her greatest achievement. This work, premiered in Vienna in late 2006, deals with the self-destructive impulses of the French mystic, mathematician and philosopher Simone Weil.
     
No, thus far the most successful peak of drama and dramatisation is Saariaho’s Quatre Instants song cycle, written for soprano Karita Mattila.
      The music lets Mattila explore every shade of the expressive spectrum of her voice, glowing incandescent through moments of passion and remorse, while the orchestration work is quite fantastic.
      A live recording of the earlier version with piano accompaniment has been released by Ondine.
      I also find myself getting ecstatic over the easily-approachable Notes on Light (2006) for cello and orchestra, composed for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Finnish soloist Anssi Karttunen, as well as over Orion (2002), a commission from the Cleveland Orchestra.
      Saariaho’s Laterna Magica (2008), premiered in August of this year by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and inspired by the autobiography of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director, also brings in rhythmic effects in a new way.
     
For Saariaho, prizes and all the public attention are a kind of "dreamlike reality”. Music is communication, and Saariaho is happy because she has managed to forge a contact with people through her music.
      At the same time, Saariaho’s ”real reality” exists in her study, where she has to work grittily and to keep tight schedules.
      Saariaho has completed her new opera/monodrama Emilie several months ago, even though the work will have its world premiere in Lyon - with Karita Mattila starring - no sooner than in March 2010.
      The next item to emerge from her study in Paris will be a string work for the trio of Ernst Kovacic, Steven Dann, and Anssi Karttunen, slated for performance at festivals in Sweden, Finland, and Germany in the summer of 2010, to be followed closely by a clarinet concerto for Kari Kriikku, and both are bang on schedule.
     
Is this what is at the heart of Saariaho's composing?
      The celestial visions she conjures up come into being through a very down-to-earth and rigorous self-discipline and diligence.
      In Saariaho the dreamer and the worker-bee come together in an ideal blend.
     
     

The Wihuri Sibelius Prize has been awarded to the following composers:
      Jean Sibelius, 1953 Finland
      Paul Hindemith, 1955 Federal Republic of Germany
      Dmitri Shostakovich, 1958 USSR
      Igor Stravinsky, 1963 USA
      Benjamin Britten, 1965 United Kingdom
      Erik Bergman, Usko Meriläinen and Einojuhani Rautavaara jointly, 1965 Finland
      Olivier Messiaen, 1971 France
      Witold Lutoslawski, 1973 Poland
      Joonas Kokkonen, 1973 Finland
      Krzysztof Penderecki, 1983 Poland
      Aulis Sallinen, 1983 Finland
      György Ligeti, 2000 Austria
      Magnus Lindberg, 2003 Finland
      Per Nørgård, 2006 Denmark
      Kaija Saariaho, 2009 Finland
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 10.10.2009


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Ondine Records´ Saariaho CD wins Midem Classical Award (21.1.2009)
  Kaija Saariaho awarded 2008 Nemmer Composition Prize (3.4.2008)
  Musical America names Kaija Saariaho Composer of the Year (14.11.2007)

Links:
  Kaija Saariaho on Ondine Records
  Kaija Saariaho homepage
  Kaija Saariaho (Wikipedia)
  Wihuri Foundation for International Prizes
  Finnish Music Information Centre: Kaija Saariaho