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Kate Molleson talks at length to one of the 21st-century's leading creative artists – Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.

Celebrating her 70th birthday this year, Kaija describes music as a study of self and the human spirit. Kate meets her at home in Paris where she reflects on her life in music, describing the conviction with which she pursued compositional classes with Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy, and the distinctive musical style she developed as a result. Kate hears how Saariaho found herself in the musical milieu of Paris and the draw of the city’s research institute for music and sound, IRCAM, where she cemented her place on the world stage with a dazzling work for small chamber orchestra and electronics inspired by the aurora borealis, Lichtbogen (1986). She tells Kate too about the challenges of writing her opera, Innocence. The subject matter deals with the legacy of trauma surrounding a shooting in a Finnish international school, and the inevitability of embodying the emotional pain of the story’s characters during the composition process.