SAARIAHO, KAIJA - New Gates

Format: CD

Label & Cat.Number: Mode Records MODE 91

Release Year: 2001

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €15.00

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Vier Stücke der finnischen Komponistin, uns bekannt von der fantastischen INA GRM–economique maxiCD „Six Japanese Gardens“ ! Spannungsgeladene, eindringliche, transzendierend-unheimliche Neue Musik-Kompositionen für Streicher, Gesang, Flöten, Harfe, mit ausführlichen Liner Notes auf Englisch, Deutsch und Französisch.

“Kaija Saariaho is the most successful of contemporary Finnish composers. She has won a number of international composition prizes, among them the Prix Italia in 1988. Her compositions have been recorded by, among others, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dawn Upshaw and the Kronos Quartet. She studied in Freiburg, and finally settled in Paris, at IRCAM, the centre for computer music. Saariaho continues to live in Paris.
"In Cendres, musical tension is created by sometimes bringing the instruments as close together as possible in all compositional aspects (such as pitch, rhythm, dynamics, articulation, color), sometimes letting each of them express the music in their own most idiomatic way. In between these extremes one can find an unlimited number of possibilities to create more or less homogenic musical situations. The awareness of this variety was the rope on which I was balancing when working on the piece." (K.S.)
"Grammar of Dreams was born from my curiosity of the relation of human voice to instruments, a subject which I had put aside for many years. As the title of the piece proposes, another source of interest here was the structural life of dreams." The major part of the text is a collage from the texts of Paul Eluard.
"Solar was written for Champ d'Action. Solar is based on the idea of a permanent harmonic structure, which spreads its own image all around and continually brings the harmony back to its original form, as if obeying the laws of gravity. This idea gave the work its title."
New Gates is based on a ballet with no story line: the general theme is passing from one state to another, opening doors, gates, falling, crossing the water, etc.- themes often found in mythologies. As the title suggests, the music moves towards gates, opens them showing us new landscapes, and continues then again towards new gates.
The above quotes are taken from the liner notes, written by the composer.
The Belgian ensemble Champ d'Action takes its name from Umberto Eco's influential book Opera Aperta, which refers to new ways in which to understand the relationships between science and the arts. After more than a decade of intense activity, the ensemble still owes its relevance in the musical world to this meaningful term. Champ d'Action realizes high quality performances and recordings of such music by working directly with the composer. Conductors are carefully selected on the grounds of their working relationship with the composer. This is the first of a series of CDs for Mode, which will also include portrait-CDs of Luc Ferrari and Iannis Xenakis, among others.” [label info]