When brain cancer claimed Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in 2023, the classical world lost one of its most distinctive voices, a vivid orchestral painter with a palette forged in Paris’s avant garde electronic music labs. Fortunately for us she worked up until the end, and her final piece, receiving its UK premiere, formed the centrepiece of Sakari Oramo’s smartly conceived programme on themes of death and transcendence.
The concert opened with the spook-haunted Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. Oramo’s imaginatively phrased reading settled in after an initial tendency to grow too loud too soon. It was followed by a pitch-perfect account of Vaughan Williams’ uplifting Toward the Unknown Region. Oramo kept the music’s underlying tread intrepid – no airy-fairy mysticism for him – and the BBC Symphony Chorus responded to the composer’s fluent melodies with robust tone and admirable diction.
Saariaho’s Hush was written for the idiosyncratic Finnish trumpeter Verneri Pohjola. The composer described each of her concertos as a portrait of its soloist, and Pohjola’s reflected his jazz background and gift for extended techniques that take the instrument well beyond its traditional comfort zone. The work, which also echoes Saariaho’s interest in grail legends, is a musical quest in four movements containing autobiographical elements and ending in what the composer movingly referred to as her own journey into silence.
The score, parts of which Saariaho credited to the two notational assistants who helped her during her illness, is shot through with spectral fragments and wheezing, asthmatic orchestral effects. An array of tuned percussion and celesta lend a certain magical sheen. Pohjola ran the gamut, breathing and muttering through his trumpet, bending bluesy notes till they broke, and even screaming amid the vicious repetitive beat of a third movement inspired by the composer’s experience of MRI scans.
As Pohjola cried out “hush”, the final movement came to a portentous halt and a charged silence broken by a breathtaking segue into Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Oramo’s warmly organic interpretation was crowned by the ethereal solo violin of BBCSO leader Igor Yuzefovich. Their valedictory yet refreshingly unsentimental account served as a poignant eulogy to Saariaho’s genius.
