SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Kaija Saariaho, Adriana Mater: Soloists, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner (conductor), BBC Singers, Stephen Betteridge (chorus master) Barbican Hall, London 24. 4.2008. (AO)

Amin Maalouf (librettist)

Solveig Kringelborn : Refka

Monica Groop : Adriana

Gordon Gietz : Yonas

Jyrki Korhonen : Tsargo


Saariaho’s Adriana Mater premiered in Paris with Esa-Pekka Salonen, the composer’s friend from their days together at the Sibelius Institute.  In February this year, Bill Kenny, Editor of Seen & Heard, attended its Finnish premiere  in Helsinki.  As the photographs in his review show, Peter Sellar’s staging was dramatic and vivid.  Just how integral Sellar’s staging was to the impact of the opera as a whole, might perhaps be gauged from the impact of this concert performance in London.

Although the plot takes place in some unidentified war zone, news of rapes in Bosnia and Serbia dominated the headlines in the years before Saariaho wrote this opera.  Horrific as the reality may be, such things do provide ideas from which art can be made, so there’s a lot of potential for a powerfully thought-provoking opera. Also, Saariaho is one of the few composers who’s actually experienced pregnancy at first hand, and understood it from a woman’s perspective. Ideal conditions then for something quite exceptional.

Saariaho’s music evolves slowly, long lines shifting chromatically in careful progression. Her mentors were the “Spectralists”, Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail.  Hence Saariaho’s interest in shifting harmonic timbres, creating a “spectrum” of colour. It’s rather like colours in a rainbow : each is distinct, but the lines blend  at the edges, yellow to orange, the red, yet always the rainbow itself remains elusive, created from light.  Grisey and Murail, not surprisingly, were acolytes of Olivier Messiaen.  Saariaho’s long lines evolve slowly, their beauty in the gradual process of gestation.  Again, there’s a lot of potential in using this style to present a narrative like this, a story that covers a period over 20 years.  A friend of mine commented that Saariaho sounds like “Messiaen crossed with Philip Glass” in the sense that her music unfolds organically, like breathing, which is measured and even.

Few composers these days write clear cut narrative music with leitmotivs or programmes.  In The Minotaur at Royal Opera House, Birtwistles cursive, pulsating lines evolve in stylised procession. Similarly, Saariaho’s stretched chords represent represent a different kind of music for theatre. Her long introduction is densely orchestrated, even congested, but that’s the atmosphere in a village on the verge of civil war.  Furthermore, the plot predicates on moral dilemma.  Adriana doesn’t avoid Tsargo, the local drunk, because she quite fancies him.  Even at the end, after all that’s happened, she still sees he was a boy without direction, brutalised by war, yet given an identity through the conflict. When peace returns, he has nowhere to return.  Also, he’s a kinsman of sorts, not a bad guy from beyond. brute that he is. So, ambiguous music for ambiguous situations.

The Passion of Simone, last July, told the story of Simone Weil, who so rejected life that she shrank away, literally and figuratively. It was very much a one-person drama for Weil was very much a person who lived within her own narrow constraints.  Saariaho’s music therefore worked like an invisible protagonist. Free floating, liberated and immensely colourful, it was everything Weil (in the plot) could never be. It was life affirming, while Weil is a death fixated neurotic. Understanding the way the music works in The Passion of Simone is integral to understanding the opera itself.  In Adriana Mater, the action happens in the singing roles. In that sense, it is surprisingly close to conventional opera.  Yet the libretto itself is so understated as to be almost anti-dramatic.  When Yonas, the son born of rape grows up and questions his parentage, the lines he and his mother sing border on the banal. “What is my name ?” “What is your name ?” “You were not born with an instruction manual”.  This isn’t necessarily a problem when such lines are set to gloriously descriptive music, but here the music is deliberately understated and restrained. The grey and black tones don’t vary enough for dramatic effect, especially when they’re sustained for nearly 3 hours.  No wonder the Sellars production worked so well, for it must have injected an extra level of drama and intensity.
~
Monica Groop created Adriana in Paris and in Helsinki, and has worked extensively with Saariaho, so her performance was confident and assured, if a little under dramatised.  Her voice seems richer and rounder these days, and the sheer stamina of this part brought out her best. More striking, surprisingly, was Solveig Kringelborn as Adriana’s sister Refka.  Hers is by far the smaller role, yet she sang it with such brightness and animation, that Refka felt like a real person with feelings that didn’t just lie flat on the surface.  Jyrki Korhonen as Tsargo, was also well characterised, especially in the last Act where he’s developed as a person through years of suffering.  How did he get blind, one wonders ?  He’s blind because it serves a purpose in the narrative, so it would flesh out the role if more were made of it. These are the sort of details that make for deep interpretation. Yonas is also a roughly sketched role, so it didn’t reveal Gordon Gietz’s full powers.  Saariaho is no Janáček in terms of character definition.  Her roles seem like extensions of musical atmosphere and are no less interesting in those terms. Amin Maalouf’s texts for L’Amour de loin worked well because they were atmospheric and impressionistic.  But by its very nature, Adriana Mater deals with concrete specifics, so a sharper focus   Yet again, the fully staged production would have supplied the drama and character development that made the opera such a success.  The BBC Symphony and Singers are always solidly reliable but perhaps Gardner’s conducting might have been less relaxed and brought out more of the tension that lurks deeper within this music.

Anne Ozorio

Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page