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Music Review

Celebrating a composer’s color, timbre, and texture

By David Weininger

 |  Globe Correspondent  

  May 05, 2012

Few composers write music that is as painterly as Kaija Saariaho’s. The Finnish composer is a master of color, timbre, and texture, seemingly able to create an array of previously unimagined sounds from any combination of instruments. More than once during the International Contemporary Ensemble’s “Composer Portrait’’ at the Gardner Museum on Thursday - a series imported from New York’s Miller Theatre - one almost felt the light in Calderwood Hall change when one of Saariaho’s new sonorities emerged.

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