The work had its United Kingdom premiere at the Barbican Centre, London in July 2007 and its US premiere in August 2008 at the Lincoln Center, New York City, as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival. Unlike previous performances, the French premiere at the Opéra Bastille in June 2009 was performed without Sellars' staging. Nevertheless, Dawn Upshaw, for whom the role of the narrator was originally written, performed in all three premieres.
Chamber version (2013)
On a suggestion by director Aleksi Barrière and conductor Clément Mao-Takacs,[2] the composer created a chamber version of the piece that has been more popular (both in terms of critical response and number of productions) than the original. It is the same length as the original version and the soloist's vocal line and the spoken text are unchanged. But the orchestration is for 19 musicians and uses no electronic elements, and four solo voices replace the SATB chorus –a feature that Saariaho later reused and developed in her opera Only the Sound Remains, which she started composing soon after completing the arrangement of La Passion de Simone.
This chamber version was premiered on 14 November 2013 in Bratislava, in the framework of the Melos-Ethos Festival for Contemporary Music, in a production conceived and realized by the French music theatre company La Chambre aux échos. The main character was performed by soprano Karen Vourc'h [fr], accompanied by a vocal quartet and an actress, and the chamber ensemble Secession Orchestra, conducted by Clément Mao-Takacs. The stage direction was devised by Aleksi Barrière. This "poignant production",[3] which has been described as "superb in every sense" by the press,[4] has since toured worldwide with soprano Sayuri Araida in the main role, and was performed as the local premiere of the chamber version in France,[5] Finland[6] and the USA among others.