Pathbreaking Finnish composer’s work ‘entirely original and accessible’
Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer brought up in the male-dominated world of high modernism who forged an artistic identity wholly her own and rose to the top ranks of contemporary classical music, died Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.
The cause was brain cancer, said her publisher, Chester Music. Her final piece, a trumpet concerto, will premiere in August with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, a leading interpreter of Saariaho’s music.
Saariaho was always “upset by being called a female composer,” director Peter Sellars said, but her work “has such deep meaning for so many people who did not hear their voices in classical music.”
Sellars, a longtime collaborator who is staging her 2006 opera Adriana Mater, which was performed in 2008 at the Santa Fe Opera, at the San Francisco Symphony next week, added: “It’s a feminine voice that we never had before. Kaija literally opened the other half of the world to classical music.”
Her music has also been performed at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
Throughout her career, Saariaho didn’t work in explicitly traditional forms, but she wrote for many musical configurations: solo instrument and chamber ensemble, symphony orchestra and opera. And while composing, she told biographer Pirkko Moisala, she viewed herself as a socially conscious organic farmer.
“The task of today’s artist is to nurture with spiritually rich art,” she said. “To provide new spiritual dimensions. To express with greater richness, which does not always mean more complexity but with greater delicacy.”
Kaija Anneli Saariaho was born Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki, the eldest of three children of Launo Laakkonen, an entrepreneur, and Tuovi Laakkonen. Her family was not musical, but she began to study violin at age 6 and piano at 8; her mother later told her that at night she would ask for someone to “turn the pillow off ” because she could hear so much music coming from it that she couldn’t sleep.
After completing her secondary education at the Rudolf Steiner School in Helsinki, she enrolled at the Helsinki Conservatory of Music, as well as the Institute of Industrial Arts, where she was a graphic design student.
She married Markku Saariaho, but divorce followed quickly, and in 1972, she moved in with a new partner, visual artist Olli Lyytikäinen. They lived together for seven years, during which their Helsinki apartment became a gathering place for young, like-minded people.
Eventually, Saariaho left the graphic design program to study composition with Paavo Heininen at the storied Sibelius Academy. There, her social circle included musicians who are now luminaries, including Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen. Together, they formed the group Korvat Auki! (Ears Open!) to disseminate modern music. “We did concerts in schools and hospitals and so on — outside gas stations in the middle of nowhere, in snowbanks,” Salonen said.
Saariaho’s earliest published music reflects her education and interests, like Verblendungen (1984), a work of rich, shifting colors in which a live ensemble and tape begin in timbral conflict with each other before shaping a new, distinct sound together.
Her aesthetic of this era, Salonen said, has a “very particular kind of magical beauty and kind of emotional language, which conveys very deep, very strong emotions.” He added she “brought elements back to contemporary music that had been, if not missing, at least hidden.”
“She brought back deep emotion and immediate emotion to Western art music without cheapening anything,” Salonen said.