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Jaufré Rudel, Prince of Blaye, falls madly in love with a woman he has only ever heard of: Clémence, Countess of Tripoli. When she hears the songs he has composed in her honour, she falls in love with him. However, as he travels to Tripoli to realise their love, he becomes so ill with the fear of their meeting that upon arrival he is near death's door. All the couple have time for before he dies is a brief love duet, after which a grief-stricken Clémence vows to enter a convent. It's a classic tale of idealistic love retaining its perfection only through death; a bit like whether Romeo and Juliet would have made it to their diamond anniversary had they had time to discover that Romeo left the toilet seat up and Juliet overspent on clothes.
Saariaho's fluidly structured score constantly hints at the intangibility of this strange 'love'. There's an ethereal lack of distinction between instrumental timbre and harmony. Modal inflections suggest antiquity, snippets of eastern scales recall the Orient, but it's hard to put a finger on what the harmonic sum of all these parts actually is, other than an atmospheric, illustrative palette of colours. There are no obvious musical or dramatic events.
The success of such a score, then, rests entirely on the sense of atmospheric tension the orchestra is able to create. Happily, Kent Nagano's interpretation here makes the most of every nuance. Saariaho's vocal writing is also minimalist, with the women in particular not exploring their tessiture until much later on. However, these soloists give it all they’ve got, and Ekaterina Lekhina's delivery of the Countess's final prayer is every bit as desolately powerful as it is on the stage.
All in all, this is a finely balanced and atmospheric performance, ensuring that the opera works almost as well on disc as it does on stage. No mean feat.
Performers: Kent Nagano (cond.); Ekaterina Lekhina (sop.); Marie-Ange Todorovitch (mez. sop.); Daniel Belcher (bar,); Rundfunkchor Berlin; Deutsches Symphonie Orchester. --Charlotte Gardner
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Review
Listening to this excellent recording from Berlin you get little sense of the work s theatrical viability but a very clear idea of the work s sophistication. --Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 25/26 July 2009
A finely balanced and atmospheric performance. --Charlotte Gardner, BBC Online, 24 August 2009
Listening to this excellent recording from Berlin you get little sense of the work s theatrical viability but a very clear idea of the work s sophistication. --Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 25/26 July 2009
A finely balanced and atmospheric performance. --Charlotte Gardner, BBC Online, 24 August 2009
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Customer Reviews
I bough this opera a week ago and have listened to it just about every night- I just cant fault it!
All in all this a very important work from a much liked and respected composer that is sure to win a lot of awards and hearts!
The first three acts show a pilgrim figure (aptly described at one point as the "voice of reason") traveling back and forth between the two other characters dreaming of each other who only briefly meet once during the fourth act before being distanced again by death. Musically it is accompanied by this great wash of sounds (mostly strings, flutes, percussion, harp, piano) that continuously shimmer away, making up an atmosphere best described as darkly tranquil, often melancholic, occasionally suffocating even. Two choirs (one male, one female) play a substantial role too - sometimes they are part of the orchestral palette, at other times they sing part of the text to comment on events or whisper away in the background. The final two acts are the liveliest and most operatic but overall, even though the text tries hard to portray the emotions felt by the protagonists, it is quite difficult to become involved as such, for that the atmosphere conveyed by the music, although it possesses great beauty, is too rarefied and tranquil. In this sense the opera is like Debussy's Pelleas & Melisande, which is not dissimilar musically either. Although L'Amour de Loin has been enjoying a bit of a performance tradition both staged and in concert after having been completed in 2000, Saariaho has since seen fit to re-arrange parts of this work into a half-hour concert piece featuring just the two distant lovers. I feel her method might accordingly be better suited to composing song cycles rather than operas.
High marks to the Harmonia Mundi label for recording this work in studio conditions, a rare occurrence indeed these days with regards to opera recordings, especially for such a recent composition.
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