Émilie, Kaija Saariaho’s third opera, is a 70-minute monodrama, to a libretto by Amin Maalouf. It was composed for the soprano Karita Mattila and depicts the events on a single night towards the end of the life of the 18th-century scientist Émilie du Châtelet. The premiere at the Opéra de Lyon in 2010 left a rather bland impression, but the following year Saariaho extracted a suite from her score, omitting the electronic transformations of the original and separating three of the vocal movements with two interludes of orchestral music. The atmosphere and pastel shades of the opera are preserved, but it’s the song cycle on this disc, Quatre Instants, settings from 2002 of four poems by Maalouf, that shows off Saariaho’s vocal writing more convincingly, with the voice of Karen Vourc’h wrapping itself around the tendrils of melody. Between the two comes Terra Memoria, an expansion for string orchestra of what began in 2007 as a string quartet, that exploits every colouristic aspect of contemporary string technique while remaining within relatively safe musical bounds.
