London, Barbican: Saariaho's ‘L'amour de loin’

• Published in: Tempo Vol. 57; no. 224; pp. 42 - 43
• Main Author: Anderson, Martin
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.04.2003
• Subjects: FIRST PERFORMANCES; Opera; Opera houses; Orchestras; Schizophrenia; Vocal music
• ISSN: 0040-2982; 1478-2286
• DOI: 10.1017/S0040298203220155

Kaija Saariaho's opera L'amour de loin – her first – was completed in 2000 and given its first production at the Salzburg Festival that year; it toured to Paris in late 2001 and to Santa Fe in 2002; it has also been staged in Darmstadt. Its concert presentation at the Barbican on 21 November was thus the first performance without the support of stage business – and, not having seen those earlier productions, one wonders how it can have been staged at all: the work is a drama-less, interiorized dreamscape-cum-ritual which proceeds in the imaginations of its symbolic characters. Those are the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, Prince de Blaye (baritone – on this occasion Gerald Finley), whose idealized love Clémence, Princess of Tripoli (soprano – Dawn Upshaw) lives at a (literally) respectable distance, at the other end of the Mediterranean; the go-between is a pilgrim (mezzo soprano – Beth Clayton); male and female choruses, deployed separately and only intermittently, represent the outside world, their matter-of-factness contrasting with the high-flown unrealism of the principals.