Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023)
Adriana Mater, opera in seven tableaux (2006)
Libretto by Amin Malouf
Adriana: Fleur Barron (mezzo-soprano)
Refka, her sister: Axelle Fanyo (soprano)
Yonas, Adriana’s son: Nicholas Phan (tenor)
Tsargo, Yonas’s father: Christopher Purves (baritone)
San Francisco Chorus and Symphony / Esa-Pekka Salonen
rec. live, June 2023, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, USA (concert performance)
Text and translation available on line
Deutsche Grammophon 4866678 [2 CDs: 127]

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho started as a rather severe modernist, but in 1982 she moved to Paris and became interested in the spectralist music of Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, also in the possibilities of using electronics. She developed a distinctive neo-Romantic idiom of great beauty, with shimmering textures and leaping melodic lines. She came to wider notice with her first opera, L’Amour de Loin (2000), which has been widely taken up, with both an audio recording (review), a DVD from DG of a Finnish production and another video recording from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which is available on line.

Adriana Mater is Saariaho’s second opera and is in contrast with the first. That set a story set in the legendary past, romantic and slow moving. She said that she wanted then to set a story with a contemporary setting, though she kept the same librettist, the French writer of Lebanese origin Amin Maalouf, who in fact has been the librettist for all six of her operas. This is the longest of them, and, indeed her largest work.

The story is grim. The time and place are not named but we should think of somewhere like the Balkans during the period of civil wars in the 1990s. At the beginning, Adriana rejects the advances of Tsargo because he is drunk, though she says that if he were sober and well turned out she might feel differently about him. In the next scene, some time later, war has broken out. Tsargo is now a soldier with others under his command. He forces his way into Adriana’s house and rapes her, though the rape is not shown on stage. She becomes pregnant and her sister Refka is horrified that Adriana is going to keep the baby. That ends the first act. The second act takes place seventeen years later. Adriana’s child Yonas has been brought up to believe that his father was a soldier who had died heroically. He discovers that this is not so, that he was conceived as a result oif rape and that his father is still alive. He resolves to search him out and kill him. In the climactic scene Yonas finds Tsargo, who is now much older and at first will not face Yonas. When Yonas prepares to kill him Tsargo turns round and shows that he is blind. Yonas cannot bear to kill him. In the last scene, which does not take place in a single space, the four them reflect on what has happened.

This bald sunmmary does not justice to the fluctuating emotions of the characters and the really subtle writing of the libretto, which needs to be followed closely. The music shows an advance on L’Amour de Loin with a wider variety of moods, including the brooding and sinister opening and the violent music depicting the rape. Adriana’s determination to keep her child, despite the circumstances of his conception, and her well-meant attempt to conceal his origins from him, are well captured. Her sister Refka is a good foil to her. Yonas‘s anger at having been misled, his anger with his father and his discovery that he cannot carry out his plan of murder are well handled, and Tsargo himself, though not a sympathetic character, is not just a stage villain. The vocal lines are mainly in arioso though there are aria-like passages for all the principals. There is also a wordless choir which supports the climaxes and, I think, would not appear on stage.

The performances are strong. Fleur Barron, almost continually on stage, carries the title role well. Axelle Fanyo is very competent as the sister Refka, but their voices are rather too similar for convenience and I sometimes had difficulty distinguishing them. Nicholas Phan is tough and angry as Yonas and Christopher Purves takes the thankless role of Tsargo with great conviction. Esa-Pekka Salonen, an old friend of the composer, conducted the premiere in 2006, by all accounts a rather chaotic affair, but is completely on top of the work here. The recording is of a single live concert performance. It was first made available digitally last year but the CD version has only now appeared.

While we are grateful to DG for putting this important work on disc, I have to say that the skimpy presentation and does not justice to it. Harmonia Mundi’s issue of L’Amour de Loin, also on two discs, put them in a box with a chunky booklet containing the libretto in three languages. DG should have done the same. Instead, they have opted for a double CD, and the booklet is a thin affair without the libretto. A note gives a link to read it on line. This link did not work on my tablet, but I found the libretto by putting just ‘adriana mater’ into a search engine, which led me to a text in the original French with a facing English translation. (The French alone has also been published as a booklet.) I find this unsatisfactory: those of us who want a physical product do not want to have to read texts on line or print out piles of A4 sheets to get a hard copy. Still, it is worth putting up with these inconveniences to get to know this powerful work.

Stephen Barber

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