Kaija Saariaho

Kaija Saariaho was one of the group of Finnish modernists who received their early training under Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (Magnus Lindeberg was another), where she was one of the founder members of the group Korvat auki ("Ears Open"), which met to discuss new music and occasionally put on concerts of both their own works and new music that deserved an airing in Finland. She went on the study with Brian Ferneyhough in Freiburg im Breisgau, also attending the summer courses at Darmstadt. A decisive move - in both professional and personal terms - came in 182, when she first went to Paris to study computer music at IRCAM : Paris is now her home. It was there that she became more deeply acquainted with the "spectral" approach to composition of Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, with considerable effect on her own scores, which increasingly focused on music and sound, examining its constituent elements in microscopic detail, this spectral analysis suggesting larger harmonic patterns. Over the last decade, though - spurred by the opera "L'Amour de loin" ("Love from Afar"), which occupied her thoughts for years before she sat down to its actual composition in 1997 - her style has lightened, admitting a lyrical element, even adopting a degree of classicality. Saarioho's music has often been written for close friend - musicians like Esa-Pekka Salonen and the cellist Anssi Karttunen have been associated with it more or less since the outset.