Without intending to, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra is doing a little spadework for the Canadian Opera Company this week by giving the Canadian premieres of two pieces by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The COC has put Saariaho's opera L'amour de loin on its schedule for eight mainstage performances next winter - a bold move, considering the scarcity of Canadian performances of her work.
She's a star abroad, and a collegial musician who has had the great fortune to work closely with other first-rate Finnish musicians. Soprano Karita Mattila can write her own ticket in virtually any opera house in the world; Anssi Karttunen is a cellist of great skill and eloquence.
They got together for the first Canadian performance of Saariaho's Mirage, a setting of a short text by a Mexican shaman and magic-mushroom eater named Maria Sabina. Thursday's performance may be the first time the TSO has been involved in the direct representation of a drug trip.
As you might imagine, the music adhered to few fixed co-ordinates, as Mattila sang lines such as "I am the shooting-star woman beneath the water." Clouds of orchestral sound rose like vapour around the simple yet arresting vocal line. The part was custom-made for Mattila's powerful, creamy soprano and dramatic presence, and played to her strengths. Its most memorable sound, for me, was the expressively shallow tone Mattila achieved for the second pass at the line, "I am the lady doll."
The cello felt like an obbligato part, sometimes fluttering around the voice like a butterfly. The large orchestra stayed in the background for much of the piece (held in fine balance by conductor Hannu Lintu), surging into brief prominence just before the last soaring high note from Mattila - a somewhat pat climax, but understandable given the last ecstatic words: "I can fly."
The other Saariaho premiere was Laterna Magica, a 20-minute orchestral piece that devoted much of its first half to clustral harmonic events that shimmered and overlapped each other with shades of often pungent colour. A new instrument or combination would sometimes trigger a change in tempo, suggesting a watchful, reactive environment in which the effect of any action could ripple through the whole.
Later, the music became more linear, and less compelling, as if Saariaho had lost interest in her three-dimensional universe and decided to head for a definite destination. A heavy duet for two sets of timpani battered its way toward that end, though the actual ending came with a pair of sighs, first in the flutes, and then from the brass.
Mattila returned for a miraculous performance of Jean Sibelius's Luonnotar, a daring and exploratory 1919 setting of a creation myth from the Kalevala series of epic poems. There was some incredible stuff in this piece, including the odd, halting, two-note diction that came up when the luonnotar (or nature-spirit) cried out for help, and the rhythmic pulsing of uncertain harmony that murmured through the orchestra as Mattila, in a vocal line drained of emotion, recounted how the night sky sprang from a broken egg. Quiet as it was, this passage was primal in the extreme.
Karttunen gave an impassioned performance of Ernest Bloch's Schelomo, though this slab of romantic folkish modernism seemed out of place on this program. Lintu led the orchestra through a patient reading of Sibelius's rather static instrumental puzzler, Der Barden, and closed the show with an excitingly well-paced if sometimes rhythmically square rendition of Ravel's La Valse. The orchestra displayed a beautiful silvery sound under this conductor, and an alertness to detail that tells me the TSO should have him back soon.
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Karita Mattila, soprano
Anssi Karttunen, cello
- At Roy Thomson Hall
- In Toronto on Thursday
The TSO repeats this program Saturday night.