Public Programs And Events

La Passion de Simone (chamber version, 2013)
"A Musical Path In Fifteen Stations"

Music: Kaija Saariaho
Libretto: Amin Maalouf 
Director: Aleksi Barrière
Conductor: Clément Mao-Takacs
Solo soprano: Sayuri Araida
Production by La Chambre aux échos

Mannes Composer in Residence Kaija Saariaho, whose first opera L’Amour de loin will be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in December, will be featured in a variety of events in NYC this season, including performances at the Park Avenue Armory with the New York Philharmonic and at the Juilliard School.  In this context, Mannes School of Music presents two exceptional staged performances of Saariaho’s cornerstone oratorio La Passion de Simone. This musical path in 15 stations is a major work crafted by composer Kaija Saariaho and writer Amin Maalouf, a contemporary Passion play on the ‘luminous trajectory’ of philosopher and activist Simone Weil, who devoted her life to the oppressed and met an untimely death in 1943. It will be performed in the critically-acclaimed production of the French music theater company La Chambre aux échos which has successfully toured in Europe, and for its NY premiere with the expert musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and students of Mannes.

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now making a worldwide impact. Born in Helsinki in 1952, she studied at the Sibelius Academy there with the pioneering modernist Paavo Heininen and, with Magnus Lindberg and others, she founded the progressive "Ears Open" group. She continued her studies in Freiburg with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber, at the Darmstadt summer courses, and, from 1982, at the IRCAM research institute in Paris, the city which has been most of the time her home ever since.

Presented by Mannes School of Music in collaboration with La Chambre aux échos and International Contemporary Ensemble. With special thanks to the Rolex Institute and with the support of the Finlandia Foundation National.

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