Song for Betty (2001)

'Song for Betty' is the somewhat unlikely title of the latest Kaija Saariaho score to receive its first British performance. Written as an 80th birthday present for Betty Freeman, a generous patron of new music in America, it is a voiceless arrangement of the closing pages of Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin.
With its wind and strings solos over a shimmering bed of sound, this was more than an effective curtain-raiser: a reproach to British opera houses for not having yet staged this haunting work.

“While the great patrons of composers were once monarchs, princes and cardinals, in the last 100 years that function has been taken over by a remarkable sorority of American women, including most recently selfless, energetically and productively, Betty Freeman.
From Friday to Sunday the Los Angeles Philharmonic - one of her many beneficiaries - gave three concerts in her honor aat the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion here and inserted on each occasion the kind of surprise that would please her best: a new piece. …
Kaija Saariaho’s “Song for Betty” was more about her inner serenity and her warmth, with its wide, beautiful harmonies (suggesting voices at one point) and its wisps of melody form solo woodwinds and strings.”