Saariaho - L'Amour de Loin / Dawn Upshaw, Gerald Finley, Monica Groop, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Finnish National Opera, Helsinki
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Manufacturer: Philips
Starring: Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Monica Groop, Peter Sellars
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0044007340264
Format: Classical
Label: Philips
Manufacturer: Philips
Number Of Discs: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Philips
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2005-09-13
Running Time: 139
Studio: Philips
Theatrical Release Date: 2005
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Stunningly beautiful, visually and vocally
Comment: Everyone is at the top of their game - singers, orchestra, conductor and composer, first and foremost. So glad I took a chance on this, having been recently "turned on" to Saariaho's amazing output. I can't stop watching it. If you're not fluent in French, be sure to turn on the subtitles/translations - at least once - to get the full effect. It is quite highly charged!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Why aren't more contemporary operas this good?
Comment: Kaija Saariaho has been making a stellar reputation for herself as a force in contemporary music (thanks in part to the advocacy of her old school chum Esa-Pekka Salonen). After years of swearing she'd never write something as old school as an opera, she produced "L'amour de Loin," which more or less translates as "The Distant Love." It's a curiously undramatic plot: a poet, bored with his life of endless partying, falls in love with a woman he's never met. A traveling pilgrim conveys his poems to the woman, and she falls in love with him, or more, the idea of him. In an attempt to meet his idealized love, the poet crosses the sea, and becomes ill. The two "lovers" meet for the first time, only to have the poet die. But what remarkably passionate music Saariaho invests in this play of ideas, and how exquisitely Dawn Upshaw, Gerald Finley and Monica Groop sing it; the off-stage choral writing is also remarkably powerful. Moreover, for all it's beauty and passion, this score never ever sounds like a 19th century pastiche. Brava to the composer for demonstrating that it is possible to write music that is emotionally compelling without having to revive the vocabulary of Romanticism. Bravo, too, to DGG for bringing out the work on DVD: Dawn Upshaw's final scene is one of the most stunning moments of lyric theater I've ever seen.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I concur with other reviewers
Comment: The previous reviewers describe the opera quite eloquently and thoroughly. The music placed in the throat of "Rudel" is particularly moving, and Gerald Finley sings gloriously. As a scholar and performer of troubadour music myself, I find the subtle echoes of Medieval poetry and nearly subliminal inflections of troubadour melody very interesting and effective. This is a masterful opera, beautifully staged.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A moving opera with a fantastic libretto, though Saariaho's music is uneven
Comment: In the mid-1990s Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho became attracted to the poetry of Jaufre Rudel, the 12th-century troubadour and lord of Blaye who wrote striking poems of love to a woman far away whom he couldn't and, possibly, never even did meet. In "Lonh" for soprano and electronics (1996), she set one of his songs for Dawn Upshaw to sing, and then she wrote her first opera L'AMOUR DE LOIN ("Love from Afar") on the theme. This 2004 performance is by the Finnish National Opera. It's conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, a long-time proponent of Saariaho's music, having known her since their days at school. This staging is directed by Peter Sellars, whose quirky stage design actually agrees with the composer's intentions this time (imagine that).
According to Rudel's unreliable biography, his love was for the Countess of Tripoli, whom he never saw but to whom he nonetheless pledged his eternal love. Amin Maalouf's libretto treats precisely this part of his life. In the first act, Rudel (a baritone, here Gerald Finley) in his castle reflects how he's stuck in a rut, no longer able to show daring skill with women and make other men jealous. A pilgrim comes and tells him of a woman he saw on the other side of the sea, who is everything Rudel says he desires. The troubadour decides to desire only her, and yet he knows he cannot even see her. The pilgrim is an androgynous persona, treated as male but sung by a woman (a mezzo-soprano, here Monica Groop). This pilgrim moves back and forth across the sea, speaking individually to the Countess of Tripoli (a soprano, here Dawn Upshaw), and then Rudel again. Eventually, Rudel decides to travel with the pilgrim to Tripoli, meeting his destiny in a tragic ending. Maalouf is a fantastic librettist, I can think of few scenes in opera as moving as the duet between Rudel and the Countess in Act IV. And although there are only three characters (and an unseen chorus representing the young men of Blaye and the young women of Tripoli), there is never that there's not enough going on; dramatic tension stays high throughout.
Saariaho's music is quite systematic. The part of Rudel is subtle, full of small steps. The soprano is characterized by wide leaps on a diatonic scale. Strikingly, the song of the pilgrim changes based on who she is addressing, reflecting her role as intermediary. The orchestral music is concerned mainly with timbre, with occasional flashes of vibrant colour as in Messiaen or Debussy. The unseen chorus, consisting as it does of kinsmen and kinswomen who try to bring Rudel and the Countess to their senses, are accompanied by music of disruption: percussion blasts, pizzicato. The music is generally impressive, but some portions prevent me from giving this opera a five-star rating. After the middle of the 1990s, Saariaho's writing changed noticeably, and she began to eschew electronics and write overt melodies, a turn for the worst compared to her masterpieces of the early '90s, such as "Amers", "Du cristal", and "Six Japanese Gardens". Most of the opera holds its own against this early great pieces, and electronics happily abound (many sounds realized at IRCAM). Yet certain moments are all too typical of what she is writing now. Take, for instance, the beginning of act IV, as the pilgrim is sitting in his ship. The music of the scene (written also as an individual piece, the first movement of her "Oltra Mar" for choir and orchestra), is trite and bombastic and like something of out a 1970s sci-fi soundtrack. Or the scene near the end where the people of Tripoli admonish the countess, music so banal and simplistic one would hardly suspect it the work of Saariaho.
I'm never one to review well the sound and video possibilities of DVDs, as I watch them on a laptop screen and listen with headphones, but this is no poor print and the sound seems impeccable. The DVD contains a "bonus" of three interviews, with Saariaho, Salonen, and Sellars. One regrets that there's no interview with Maalouf, who bears such a great part of the responsibility for this work.
In spite of some minor complaints, any fan of contemporary music, or even general opera (there's little of the "weird modernism" or "dissonance" that could frighten traditional listeners) should see this fascinating work. Among the operas of the last 30 years, L'AMOUR DE LOIN will certainly rank among the most universally accessible (it's certainly no Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre").
Customer Rating:
Summary: Saariaho a dépassé elle-même.
Comment:
Kaija Saariaho has never been one to shy away from the characteristics associated with her sex. Her music is not accidentally expressive of these characteristics, as if she can't help herself from being nurturing, warm, shapeless, womblike and so on, but is consciously designed to be almost hyper-female, as "female" has come to be understood over time. In other words, Saariaho herself is not hopelessly female, but has a conception of what hopelessly female music might sound like and has made it her life's mission to bring such a music into being. A man aware of these characteristics could write the same music, if had Saariaho's talent. And I suppose there are women out there who could play John Wayne's roles if they looked good in chaps ( and as I know from my "reading," many women do. )
Yet the first word that came to mind when watching/listening to L'Amour de Loin for the first time was "muscular," and I have to say, I was relieved to feel those sinews finally stretching. Too much of Saariaho's music can sound indeterminate and meanderingly pretty, so that any five minutes of any piece give you pretty much the idea: fairy-dusted percussion, powdery electronics, strings that reach for the pasteboard heavens like Celine Dion... But L'Amour de Loin is a whole new Saariaho, and you feel that not only this music, but the emotions that it unlocks, has been seething inside of her for decades. The music is filled with explosions, contorted, abbreviated, or allowed to run free and trample over everything, that constantly interrupt the customary drift of Saariaho's vaporous instrumental perfumes. These have the effect of shattering not only the reveries of the characters, but of the equally suspicious reverie that has been Saariaho's career thus far, and reminding us that the beauty of most of her music has been unsatisfying precisely because it hasn't been real but rather a sort of escape from some original black hole, like the beauty of the church is for the nuns in Black Narcissus. It is fascinating to see her confronting this primal wound, and even conquering it, in her very first opera. While Saariaho and her librettist Amin Malouf are not breaking any new ground with the theme of mortal love and how it shades into longing for the absolute, if anything, L'Amour de Loin surpasses Tristan and Isolde in intensity and Pelleas and Melisande in mystery. Don't believe me? I wouldn't have believed it either until I started to ritualistically watch it every night before going to bed.
The singers are required to be in a zone of vague horror mingled with flashes of unreasonable hope, and to keep this up for over two hours. Isabelle Huppert would find that task daunting, let alone a triad of opera singers, but all three of them acquit themselves well. Gerald Finley, who is the very definition of bad acting at first, became my favorite as soon as I realized that he was feeling the music more than the others and desperately wanted to communicate what it meant to the audience. His cheeseball histrionics bring across the heightened emotions of Saariaho's music perfectly. Dawn Upshaw is more mechanical and perhaps not the spitting image of a fairy princess, but has by far the most character in her voice. About forty minutes in she's given an astounding aria written in some kind of medieval French ( "L'amour de loing" ) where she swings her voice around like a flamethrower; it's an aria that I hope replaces "La Wally" once and for all. Monica Groop matches the others step for step vocally and looks the part of a haunted pilgrim as well, but has a thankless role. In general, I think most of Peter Sellars' staging ideas are dated and 80's-feeling, but as Saariaho says in an extra included on the DVD, she was surprised how closely he hewed to her own ideas for the piece. His talent is apparent in small details, such as the way he has Upshaw lean backward out of her tower into the darkness of space right at the moment when she says the word "vide."
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