Terra Memoria (2006)

“invention curbed and directed by the imagination of this eminently gifted composer absorbing concert”

In Saariaho's Terra Memoria, the way in which some recollections remain fixed and unchanging, while others transform over time, provides the raison d'etre. The piece is full of beautifully imagined string textures.

The instrumental lines circle one another, giving the impression of a steady dance, but an angry one: the notes are frequently pushed into harsh, distorted sounds as the bows scrape up the strings. The music is underpinned by a gentle pulse in the form of two plucked notes like a heartbeat; this lets up only at the climax, when its absence is unsettling. Dedicated to "those departed", the piece is the more effective for the way its emotion is contained.

"Terra memoria," a masterful new 15-minute string quartet by Finnish-born Kaija Saariaho. She is, quite simply, one of the most original compositional voices of our time.

She has taken this venerable form and made it sound new, drawing a ceaseless variety of skewed sounds from the four instruments.

Unlike Dmitri Shostakovich, who also sought a kind of beautiful ugliness, Saariaho is going less for the harsh or violent and more for something otherworldly. It is sometimes eerie but always alluring, even poetic in its way.

The four instruments often seem to function as four distinct voices. Rather than progressing in some linear way, the music seems to turn into itself, with melodic motifs that bend and swell and recur in a circular fashion.