Certain instruments clearly fascinated Saariaho throughout her life: the cello is one and the flute another. The roots of Couleurs du vent (“Colours of the wind”) lie almost a decade earlier when Saariaho wrote Du cristal, her first large-scale orchestral work. This swiftly became the first part of a diptych, its companion …à la fumée, a double concerto for alto flute and cello with orchestra. Not content to leave this material alone, the concerto then inspired the 1998 trio Cendres (alto flute, cello, piano), and then once more Saariaho reworked this music in Couleurs du vent, for alto flute alone. She describes this piece as “an improvisation over the material of Cendres” and wrote this solo piece in a matter of days. 

 

As is the case in all three of the works performed tonight, the piece is an essay in extended techniques (unconventional ways of playing the instrument). This allows Saariaho to explore the wide variety of sounds available from the instrument, opening up a spectrum from “pure” notes through overblowing, multiphonics (akin to chords where multiple notes sound at once), and other ways of destabilising the sound.

 

This fascination with timbre, the colour of sound, was present throughout Saariaho’s career, in part inspired by the scientific analysis of sound she was able to carry out at IRCAM. In this piece, however, there is also a very real symbolic importance to this exploration of timbre. Saariaho records that the piece was written while a member of her family was suffering from mortal illness. As such, the piece became ‘a story of breathing’ and thus a celebration of life in all its fragility.

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Joshua Ballance