Kaija Saariaho: Du gick, flög for voice & cello or piano

As a composition student under Paavo Heininen’s mentorship, Kaija Saariaho (1952-2003) was fascinated by poetry that had an experimental and playful relationship to verbal expression, a lot of which was written in Swedish. In 1979, she was very much immersed in the output of a Swede Finn, Gunnar Björling, and from his poetry she composed Nej och inte, a song cycle for a cappella female voices. In 1982, Saariaho isolated one of those songs to make this version for soprano and piano, which was premiered at the Lappeenranta song competition in 1984. Buy now