Oltra mar

Program notes

About the Work

Oltra mar (‘across the sea’, in old French) is a large work for chorus and orchestra that Kaija Saariaho wrote in 1998–99 on a commission from the New York Philharmonic, which premiered it under Kurt Masur in November 1999. Subtitled ‘seven preludes to the new millennium’, it is a meditation on the great universal themes (love, death, time and the sea) and draws its texts from strikingly varied sources: a love poem by the Arab poet Abu Sa’id, a traditional Pygmy death song, and a passage on time from Samarcande, a novel by the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf.

The sea is the work’s unifying image and metaphor: for crossing, for the passage of time, for the boundary between life and death. Saariaho’s characteristic sound-world suits it perfectly, with shimmering, wave-like orchestral textures, the chorus deployed for colour and atmosphere as much as for words, and the music rising and falling in great slow swells. It connects naturally to the Sibelius seascape that opens the concert and to the prophetic, apocalyptic tone of the Adès that follows: three very different visions of water, time and fate.

What to Listen For

Approach Oltra mar as an immersive soundscape rather than a narrative. Listen for Saariaho’s extraordinary orchestral and choral colours: shimmering, watery textures, with the chorus often used as a sustained, luminous wash of sound rather than for crisp word-setting. The music moves in slow waves, swelling and subsiding like the sea that is its central image.

Follow the contrasts between the seven sections as the music turns from love to time to death, with the sea returning between them, and listen for how Saariaho conjures vast spaces and a sense of the eternal through layered, gradually shifting sonorities. This is contemporary music of great sensuous beauty. Give yourself over to its atmosphere, its play of light and shadow, and the slow tidal motion that carries it from beginning to end.