Oedipus Rex in the Finnish National Opera, the 23rd of October, 2019

The Finnish National Opera performed with stunning singers three years ago Richard Strauss’s opera “Elektra”. Now they played under the heading “Sophocles’s tragedies set to music” an orchestral version (made by Manfred Honeck and Tomáš Ille) of the same opera, so music from the opera without singers. It was truly interesting to hear the music without singers, since I got totally different type of vibes when the music was 100 % instrumental. The conductor of the evening was Eivind Gullberg Jensen.

The highlight of the evening for me was, however, “Oedipus Rex” a relatively seldom performed opera-oratorio by Igor Stravinsky.  I was a bit disappointed that we saw a concert version instead of the staged version, which as such doesn’t contain a lot of movement either, since the characters are supposed to be rather stiff, but it would have surely been interesting to see. Now most of the time the singers stood behind the main mass of the orchestra and the front stage was mainly left to the Narrator.

“Oedipus Rex” is perhaps the most famous tragedy by Sophocles. King Oedipus is given the task to find out who murdered the former king. It turns out, that Oedipus himself killed the king, not knowing he was the king and not knowing that the king was actually his biological father. In addition to the killing, Oedipus marries the window, his own mother. When this is found out, queen Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus puts out his own eyes.

Stravinsky composed “Oedipus Rex” to a libretto in Latin. The programme leaflet contained the libretto in Finnish, but I actually would have liked to have also the Latin text included, since it would have given depth to the experience, especially since the singing of the choir – despite its fierceness – was quite often not really decipherable. As such, it was possible to follow the story even without the libretto, because the Narrator (Timo Torikka) recounts the story piece by piece in the language of the audience. In the version of the Finnish National Opera Timo Torikka pranced from one end of the stage to the other carrying a plaster head of Sophocles. Well.

From time to time the music of “Oedipus Rex” was almost pompous, but I liked it a lot. My absolute favourite singer was Ekaterina Gubanova in the role of Jocasta. Deliciously dark lower notes and strong and bright high notes. Sometimes her voice was a bit too nasal, but you do hear that regularly with Russian mezzo-sopranos. Though, when she literally oozed contempt towards the lower classes when entering the stage like a true queen, the overall picture was stunning.