Quatre Instants (2002)

Quatre Instants was wonderful. Saariaho’s texts, by the Paris-based, Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, are outwardly simple love poems, deliberately engineered to allow space for the music to explore to disturbing, torrid depths all the stormy, passionate, yearning, regretful feelings that the emotion of love involves......Saariaho’s music is a haunting, gestural but florid sequence of extremes. The keyboard pert is elaborate and richly nuanced, charged with resonances of Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Like Ravel, Saariaho is intrigued by obsession, in this case reflected in the references throughout the cycle to two oscillating notes a semitone apart. Above and around this bubbling volcano the singer probes, her imagination set on fire by desire or by panic, sometimes to the point of primal scream.

Finnish goddess Karita Mattila is partway through a European recital tour, the centrepiece of which is Quatre Instants, a new song cycle by her aloof compatriot, Kaija Saariaho. Setting poetry by Amin Maalouf, Quatre Instants examines the emotions of an unnamed woman as erotic anticipation gives way first to inexplicable sexual terror, then to an ecstatic depiction of lovemaking. The cycle pushes Mattila to her vocal and expressive limits. Her voluptuous tone darkens into neurosis as the woman rails at her lover's absence. Sexually assailed by him, she repeatedly rasps the phrase "remorse burns me" in her chest register, punctuating it with shrieks, at once orgasmic and terrified. Saariaho's piano writing, astonishingly played by Tuija Hakkila, is equally intense, ranging from filigree figurations to explosive outbursts.

Karita Mattila is the inspiration behind Kaija Saariaho’s latest score Quatre Instants, just premiered in Paris and London (with the Barbican as co-commissioner), is surely one of Saariaho’s most important works to date. That is saying something, but it builds on the composer’s fruitful association with the writer Amin Maalouf, librettist of her recent opera, L’amour de loin.

His texts here, revealing different faces of love, are matched by music of hothouse intensity. The wide-ranging vocal lines are challenging, yet tailored to the big scale of Mattila’s voice. The evocative piano part, played here with fluttering virtuosity by Tuija Hakkila, is packed with detail that points towards an orchestral version, due soon.