Emilie Suite (2011)

...the concert’s most moving piece, Kaija Saariaho’s Suite from Emilie, drawn from her monodrama celebrating the uncompromising passions and genius of the 18th-century French philosopher and mathematician Emilie du Châtelet. She would die at 42 from puerperal fever and the suite of five movements reflects her premonitions of her demise, desperate to complete her translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia – she did – and to counter the oblivion conferred by death. The finesse of Saaiaho’s writing was mesmerising....