London, Barbican: Saariaho's ‘L'amour de loin’

Extract

Kaija Saariaho's opera L'amour de loin – her first – was completed in 2000 and given its first production at the Salzburg Festival that year; it toured to Paris in late 2001 and to Santa Fe in 2002; it has also been staged in Darmstadt. Its concert presentation at the Barbican on 21 November was thus the first performance without the support of stage business – and, not having seen those earlier productions, one wonders how it can have been staged at all: the work is a drama-less, interiorized dreamscape-cum-ritual which proceeds in the imaginations of its symbolic characters. Those are the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, Prince de Blaye (baritone – on this occasion Gerald Finley), whose idealized love Clémence, Princess of Tripoli (soprano – Dawn Upshaw) lives at a (literally) respectable distance, at the other end of the Mediterranean; the go-between is a pilgrim (mezzo soprano – Beth Clayton); male and female choruses, deployed separately and only intermittently, represent the outside world, their matter-of-factness contrasting with the high-flown unrealism of the principals.