A "visualised concert" is Kaija Saariaho's description of From the Grammar of Dreams, on tour this week as part of the Contemporary Music Network.
She has laced together a series of items involving two sopranos, flute, harp, viola, cello and electronics in various combinations, giving them a musical continuity and a kind of visual, if not dramatic consistency.
The result may not be significantly greater than the sum of its parts, but it does contain several items that show Saariaho's music at its most expressively persuasive and texturally refined.
The starting point is the song cycle that lends its title to the whole 70-minute sequence, and forms its centrepiece; the original From the Grammar of Dreams is a setting of Sylvia Plath from 1988. Around that are grouped smaller-scale pieces, mostly from the 1990s, all linked by a series of vocal and instrumental "messages" specially composed for the purpose.
Some numbers are compelling: Lonh, for soprano and electronics was written in 1996 as a study for Saariaho's opera L'Amour de Loin. It is a wonderful example of her recent, more linear and expressive vocal writing, while the Apollinaire setting, Il Pleut, from 1986 is a miraculously simple and beguiling miniature for high soprano and harp that unfurls continuous descending scales.
The music here is all elegantly imagined, if all delivered at one rather measured pace, and the performance is first rate - the superb soprano Anu Komsi takes the main burden of the vocal writing, supported in the duet numbers by her identical twin Piia, who plays the cello as well. There are telling contributions also from Ulrike von Meier (harp), Eva Tigerstedt (flute) and Anna Kreetta Turunen (viola).
But the visual element, devised by Saariaho and Raija Maika, is awkward and unnecessary, hardly theatrical at all (though the harpist ostentatiously reads a book when not playing). The finest of these pieces are strong enough to make their points without such distractions.
At The Anvil, Basingstoke tonight (box office: 01254 844244) then touring to Kendal, Huddersfield and Newcastle.
