True Fire, Kaija Saariaho’s new song cycle for baritone and orchestra, was written expressly for Gerald Finley. He gave the first performance in Los Angeles last year, and was the soloist for the UK premiere too, with Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
The half-hour cycle interleaves settings of Ralph Waldo Emerson – three of his Propositions – with poems by Seamus Heaney and Mahmoud Darwish and a Native American lullaby. The prevailing tone is sombre and introspective, so the whole sequence becomes a meditation on the way we perceive the world around and how we relate to it.
The music is predominantly static and much of it is very beautiful. As always with Saariaho, the orchestral textures that cushion and enfold the baritone’s lines are bewitching. Luminously coloured threads of sound, with harp and tuned percussion prominent, are woven into an ever-shifting, pulsing sonic web, which Oramo ensured never threatened to overwhelm the voice. But Finley’s superb theatrical and lyrical gifts are never exploited – much of the fifth poem, Darwish’s Farewell, is delivered parlando, for instance – and for all their harmonic subtleties the settings never really build any dramatic momentum. This is a work of contemplation and detachment mostly, which tends to keep the listener at arm’s length.
The performance, from Finley and the orchestra, was exemplary. Oramo had taken over the concert at just a few days’ notice, after the original conductor, his Finnish compatriot Santtu-Matias Rouvali, withdrew through illness. He kept the programme as planned, and conducted every work in it superbly. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture was the real revelation, not only thrillingly played by the BBCSO, but full of the telling detail and inner voices that so often get glossed over in performances that go for showboating effects. Even Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony had real weight and presence, and seemed less noisily glib than it often does.
- Available on BBC iPlayer until 14 January.
