Innocence review: Saariaho’s school shooting opera makes a powerful statement

This anticipated production, directed by Simon Stone, is painfully topical

A scene from ‘Innocence’ by Kaija Saariaho at the Royal Opera House (©Tristram Kenton)

It’s a long time since a London opera production got the frenzied advance attention Innocence has received, and that attention is for two quite separate reasons. First, because its 70-year-old Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has been hailed by new-music enthusiasts as one of the greats: in a readers’ poll of composers last year for BBC Music Magazine, she was ranked at No 17, between Brahms and Haydn – remarkable for a composer of whom most people in Britain have not heard. 

But the greater reason lies in the opera’s subject matter, which couldn’t be more painfully topical: a mass shooting at a school. Susanna Malkki, who conducted its premiere in Aix-en-Provence two years ago, and who conducts it now in London, regards it as one of the most important works of our time. Simon Rattle, who was at the premiere, said it was like watching Berg’s Wozzeck being born. And its birth was attended by representatives of opera houses in Amsterdam, Helsinki and San Francisco, as well as in London, all of whom were co-producers.

For Saariaho, for her librettist Sofi Oksanen and for her de facto second librettist (and son) Aleksi Barriere, the evolution of the work was a tortuous process that only resolved itself with a decision to parallel the real world with a retrospective “memory” world peopled by the dead.