Fastaff in Helsinki Music Centre's Sonore Stage, the 17th of October, 2017

The opera ensemble graduating class of Sibelius Academy are performing as their last opera Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff in the Helsinki Music Centre’s Sonore stage. The story tells about a poor, fat knight (Falstaff), who eagerly chases women and firmly believes in his own sex appeal until the ladies cure him of this misconception.

The best part of the performance was without doubt Ville Saukkonen’s direction together with Sampo Pyhälä’s set design and video projections and Taina Relander’s constume design. Even they alone made the opera worth seeing. Visually the performance was superb. Saukkonen has used boxes and videos before, but this time their use was upgraded to first class and they created all kinds of environments including my favourite: stables where the queen’s daughter and her beau took care of some nice looking horse heads. The costumes were made in the 1970’s spirit and I especially liked Pistola’s costume; it suited him (Visa Kohva) really well. But there were actually a lot of nice touches in the costumes that were interesting to look at.

Saukkonen had – as usual – squeezed into the opera a lot of different jokes and hints to entertainment industry and also to the seventies. And like always in Saukkonen’s works, there was a dancer involved (this time really in singular) – Oskari Kymäläinen. He had as much as nine roles to dance/play through and after the first two you really started to wait for his next appearance. Great set of characters from Kymäläinen!  

Musically the evening was unfortunately not that memorable. For some reason I could not connect with the singers and the first two acts were musically rather boring. In the third act there was finally some spirit in the performance and the final ensemble was at last rather riveting. I did like Alina Koivula’s high notes in the role of Nanette. They were really nice and clear sounding.  

In opera training you, of course, have to have lots of different types of operas (this group certainly has performed in all kinds of operas), but perhaps Falstaff was not the best choice to be their last opera.