Innocence (2018)

"Sometimes a work of great artistic merit leaves you in the position of not knowing what to say about a work of art that is so immersive you feel like it is part of your life. Innocence is an extraordinary piece of contemporary opera that will find a home among the giants of opera history as more of the world is exposed to the art of Kaija Saariaho."

"Innocence is a monumental achievement, bold and profoundly responsive to contemporary life. Its characters are deeply felt and frighteningly accessible, adrift in a revolving nightmare they can’t escape. The score is wondrously strange, capable of blending euphony and discord into an integrated, almost sacred whole."

Glissandi, a moment of string cantilena, a touch of blues in the bass: in the richness of the instrumental parts, this is a colourful concerto for orchestra, pulsating violently from the ever-present piano, but all with maximum instability. A captivating, even gripping sparkle of sound that pulls the rug from under your feet right from the start.

… Oksanen's differentiated, at times almost documentary-like text and Saariaho's tonally equally differentiated, finely nuanced music merge in an ideal way to create a real musical drama.

The most important thing, however, is the empathy of the authors Saariaho and Oksanen with all their creations, unconditional compassion in their penetrating view of them all - dare one say it: love. The play is not called ‘Guilt’, but ‘Innocence’. The title already reflects the attitude of the, nevertheless unsparing, narrators.

… Innocence is not a musically illustrated case study. Instead, this opera weaves a web of text and music that allows us to understand the horror, the ‘doom’ on a certain level. By triggering heart tremors and making us soft, ready to grasp the incomprehensible.

One could write endlessly …, how brilliantly Saariaho knows how to develop the respective changes of perspective musically. Not only does this opera not have a single weakness, it is also extremely well thought out dramaturgically.

… the composer looks deep into the human soul - and reaches cleverly, but not too far back into the instrumental cupboard, mixing various emotions together so that exactly what is to be expected from narrative art in the very best case is created: one gets to know people from different sides - and understand them in their suffering, in their love, in their (post-traumatic) states of repression.

Saariaho's Innocence … is justifiably one of the great operas of the 21st century.

...perhaps the most intrepid, disturbing, and supremely crafted opera I have ever watched, grappling audaciously but sensitively with gun violence, one of our darkest social blights. ...Saariaho was a sorceress of light and shadow, of dazzling luminosity and disconcerting orchestral stasis, all held together by a seductive aural mystique.

For this most precise of composers, several elements provide bedrock for her layered, integrated sound world: surges of percussion including bells, celesta, harp and piano; low gurgles of contrabassoons and tuba; a wordless, offstage (excellent) chorus; stark, unworldly Finnish folk song; a text that moves between Finnish, Czech, French, Romanian, Swedish, German, Spanish and Greek. Of many chilling, pivotal moments, one stands out, exemplifying Saariaho’s ability to yoke music and words to maximum effect: the essence of opera.

This staging has no weak links.

It’s an extraordinarily powerful and disturbing opera on a timely contemporary theme

Despite the overlapping time zones, there is little confusion (except perhaps betweensurvivors and victims); on the contrary, the convolutions of the set (designed by Chloe Lamford, lit by James Farncombe) gradually reveal the traumas of all those caught up inthe tragedy. The dramaturg, Aleksi Barrière, working with librettist Sofi Oksanen, hasadditionally created a multilingual text – nine language coaches are credited – whichcertainly enhances the sense of alienation.

Many a composer might have produced a score that replicated the appalling violenceand terror underlying the story. Saariaho’s approach is subtler. There are indeedpassages of snarling menace, but the predominant mode is of sustained sonorities,pierced by shards of sound or more often swishes and taps of percussion. It’s frozen intime, just as the characters have been unable to move on after 10 years.

Saariaho’s orchestral voice is urgent and intense. She eschews any temptation to slip into cinema-style illustration when tackling the narrative-heavy scenario but instead weaves an intricate tapestry of moods and colours that drift, at some points like sprinkled powder, at others in heavydramatic clumps, between emotional states. It is dreamlike, often opulent and always tangy, andwas exquisitely articulated by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Susanna Mälkki.

Surrender to Saariaho’s spell and she will wrench your heart. A new opera of great power, Innocence is a pleasure that's anything but guilty.

Saariaho and Oksanen have a masterpiece on their hands ... The roots of the opera’s success stem from the fact that a composer whose gifts lie in her ability to take apart a moment of music in time came to work with a librettist who somehow (this is Oksanen’s first libretto) has managed to do something similar with dramatic action. This combination, sufficient in itself to make something extraordinary, has found fertile ground in pretty much every artistic partnership that has been drawn into realizing the project. The dramaturg and translator Aleksi Barrière has worked the crucial international milieu of the drama into a version of the libretto employing nine languages. The director, Simon Stone, and set designer, Chloe Lamford, have employed a rotating set to depict the collision between the world of the pupils and the wedding party as something that occurs quite literally: with each rotation of the set one of the rooms in the restaurant building transforms itself into one of the rooms in the school.

The most extraordinary feature of Innocence is that while its tragic content centres on the kind of event that most of us will never experience, the psychology and phenomenology of the opera feel so acutely contemporary that the listener becomes inexorably drawn into and implicated in the world of the tragedy. Even we, as it were, alive to the disappearing boundary between agency and passivity, action and reaction, forfeit our innocence. Even we, in the opera’s devastating fallout, must mimic its characters as they try and fail to let go, not to forgive, not to forget, just to remember how to breathe. Innocence is like our own world, in other words. Dark, fearful, definitely worth a visit.

Elegant, light, haunting: the music festival in Aix-en-Provence delights above all with Kaija Saariaho's new opera, marking a triumph for women in classical music.

... Kaija Saariaho is one of the few women to succeed with her stage works. Her first opera "L'amour de loin" premiered in Salzburg 20 years ago became a huge success and has been presented all over the world. When Kaija Saariaho is pushed onto the stage in a wheelchair for the final applause in Aix, the evening is perfect. The audience, which likes to be reserved in French opera houses, had already cheered the thirteen soloists, the chorus, the conductor Susanna Mälkki, and the director Simon Stone. And now the petite red-haired woman is celebrated, who has conjured up the two-hour evening lightly, ingeniously, sonorously and with the highest artistry despite the somber theme.

The subject: a rampage in a school, ten students and a teacher are dead. Kaija Saariaho and the great librettist Sofi Oksanen are far too intelligent to tell the plot chronologically. They show a wedding in which the past drama is gradually revealed: the groom is the assassin's brother, the bride is clueless, the waitress the mother of one of the dead schoolgirls. The dead sing here just like the living, in short and rapidly changing scenes everyone gets a solo, the choir primes from the off, the tension rises. Saariaho avoids all pathos, all violence and all shock effects. Her music is light and shrouded in grief, it is fragments of dream sound from the realm of death.

Director Simon Stone is an imaginative advocate of modernity on stage and has had Chloe Lamford built a one-story house on the revolving stage, with a banquet hall, kitchen, broom closet and staircase. What is a restaurant is also the school where the murder took place. Only one person is missing: the perpetrator. He gets no voice from the composer, Simon Stone shows him only briefly. Music as well as libretto avoid any unambiguity and morality, they work out the motives and contradictions of their thirteen characters more and more clearly, they do not attempt any synthesis and offer no final judgment. In terms of condensation, precision, catchiness and commitment, the piece is reminiscent of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck." Musically, however, it is light years away from that: more elegant, lighter, more forceful, more contemporary.

Already with her third opera, the civil war rape story "Adriana Mater", Kaija Saariaho has turned to the present and to an everyday problem that usually finds no place in the usual operatic cosmos, John Adams alone being the exception. Saariaho, however, writes much more complexly than Adams. She continues what Claude Debussy initiated. She meets the unadorned reality and its brutality with a slight detachment, she wraps the action with a veil of sadness, love and clairvoyance. This enables the audience to accept this confidently unobtrusive avant-garde music without resistance.

Kaija Saariaho is the greatest master of opera today.

… In Aix-en-Provence, the premiere of her [Kaija Saariaho] fifth opera has now been unanimously acclaimed by the audience of the opening night at the Grand Théâtre de Provence.

… The story by Finnish author Sofi Oksanen is about a school massacre, the course and consequences of which are woven into an operatic psychological thriller on two time levels in the five acts in 105 minutes. Aleksi Barrière has given the original Finnish libretto a multilingual makeover with English, Czech, Romanian, French, Swedish, German, Spanish and Greek passages.

… The way the gripping opera thriller "Innocence" was brought to the stage in Aix-en-Provence is the best possible start for an opera innovation!