Disc Details

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Work Title	Composer
L' Amour de loin	Kaija Saariaho	Listen

Reviews

• This is a breathtakingly beautiful opera and Peter Sellar’s production is both visually striking and dramatically effective. The cast of singers simply couldn’t have been bettered and Salonen is a conductor with a unique understanding of the score. The DVD also contains illuminating interviews with the protagonists. One to treasure.
  Jury BBC Music Awards, BBC Music Magazine, 01 April 2006
• Kaija Saariaho’s mesmerising meditation on love and death, L ’Amour de Loin, has drawn a profound response from audiences all over the world. When given a semi-staged production at the Barbican in London two years ago, the audience emerged reeling from the opera’s sustained emotional intensity, drunk on the music’s enchantment. Director Peter Sellar’s striking production which features on this DVD presents the work brilliantly: simple, symmetrically symbolic, a stark set shimmering with the effect of light on water, mirroring the liquescent, iridescence of the score. As conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen puts it, ‘The language of Saariaho’s music vibrates in colour.’
  But this was a production that might never have happened: when Saariaho first sent the concept to Sellars he declined. ‘She sent me the story and dossier on medieval France – it was so culturally remote from any experience of reality in my life.’ But then he suggested that the Lebanese writer Amin Malouf write the libretto, and the work suddenly acquired relevance: ‘Things fell into place. Of course, medieval French culture was shaped by Arabic culture. This gave the opera a cultural urgency for me. Here we are today being presented with the clash of civilizations, when in fact there has always been cultural interchange. We as artists could tell a different story, show that something besides war could move across this landscape of separation, that there could be love and not just fear.’ Upshaw performs the part of the exiled Clemence, Countess of Tripoli, as if her life depended on it, partnered with passionate commitment by the superlative Monica Groop as the Pilgrim and Gerald Finley as the Troubadour, Jaufré Rudel, who risks his life to travel to see his beloved and dies in the progress. Literally, a dream of an opera.
  , BBC Music Magazine, 01 April 2006
• In about half the running time, Kaija Saariaho's L 'Amour de Loin tells a somewhat similar story to Wagner's Tristan und lsolde.
  Like Tristan, its hero, the 12th-century Prince de Blaye, Jaufré Rudel, who's also a troubadour, dies at the feet of his Isolde, a lady named Clémence, Comtesse de Tripoli, who lives far away across the sea, though it is he who's made the sea voyage to the denouement rather than his lady love as in Wagner's epic,
  L 'Amour de Loin is even shorter on snappy action than Tristan, but is played out in the same sort of mesmerizing, slow-motion dream world inhabited not only by Tristan but - even closer, perhaps - Claude Debussy's Pelleas et Metisande, with which it shares the French language, five-act structure and al- most ascetic, but flexible and expressive musical idiom.
  That its composer is Finnish and this absorbing DVD performance emanates from the Helsinki nerve centre of the Finnish National Opera, may seem a trifle eyebrow-raising at first glance, but tiny Fin- land's highly enlightened opera commissioning policy and willingness to stage the results at the highest artistic level quickly dispel such surprise - and in the process put, or anyhow ought to put, Howard's Australia to shame for its obsession with economic criteria to the virtual exclusion of the arts.
  L 'Amour de Loin, which of course translates as Love from Mar for those of you who don't know French, requires a minuscule cast of only three principals. There's a bit of work for an unseen offstage chorus; but what we have, stripped down to the essentials, is Jaufré, Clemence and ago- between named Le Pèlerin, the Pilgrim - a character straddling not only the sexual divide, since this male character is played by a female mezzo, but the gulf between the two physically separated lovers and, not so fancifully, the great divide between the here and now of conventional reality and the conundrum of love whose fulfillment forever flirts with death.
  Peter Sellars, sometimes seen as an enfant terrible of the opera directors fraternity, responds to the challenge of this work with stupendous understatement, as does designer George Tsypin, whose take on Sergei Prokofiev's L 'Amour de Trois Oranges for Opera Australia was such a scintillating component of last year's Opera Australia fare.
  Played out on a simple spiral staircase rising from a shallow sea -a mere two or three inches deep, I suspect - and a skeletal boat, it facilitates a seamless flow of action.
  At the same time, it focuses one's attention firmly on the superb trio of performers assembled for the world premiere of the opera at the 2000 Salzburg Festival, which is re-created on this DVD. All are absolutely perfect for their roles, singing; and acting with immense beauty and power.
  Baritone Gerald Fin- ley's Jaufré Rudel is a study in intensity - grippingly effective when the camera zooms in on his face, blowing it up to full-screen dimensions, and singing straight from his heart as one would expect of a troubadour agonizing over the pangs of unrequited love.
  Like his colleagues, he moves slowly and deliberately when he moves at all, mirroring and intensifying the psychological probings of Saariaho's score to quite gripping effect.
  We can share his ex- pressed fear of setting to sea to seek out his distanced beloved, agonize with him as he crawls painfully ashore to die, like Ii stranded sea creature unable to muster the energy to move a single muscle more.
  Likewise with Dawn Upshaw's Clémence, Comtesse de Tripoli - a beautiful and exotic creature whose body language is as exquisite as her suitor's and whose voice soars seamlessly through the strands of the musical fabric. Walking on water when appearing to Jaufré in a dream, lying flat on her back in the shallow waters of the stage setting near the end, she is a gripping presence through- out.
  And finally, there's Le Pèlerin of Monica Groop, singing with velvety mezzo richness, appearing and disappearing seamlessly, yet a trifle ominously, linking the outpourings of the souls of the man and woman whose love grows to irresistible dimensions when they are apart, only to evaporate and die along with Jaufre when they finally encounter each other in the flesh.
  Apart from that spiral staircase, which is magically transformed from Jaufré Rudel's castle in France to Clemence's habitat in Tripoli by James F. Ingall's breathtakingly simple but effective lighting design, there are a few cylindrical columns which descend intermittently from above to dangle just above the shallow seas, and the skeletal boat which ferries Le Pèlerin about and finally takes both him and Jaufré to the site of the troubadour's death.
  Throughout, there is magnificent ensemble support from the Finnish National Opera Chorus and Orchestra, meticulously fine- tuned by the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Not to be missed.
  DAVID GYGER