At the same time with Helsinki Festival we have now for the first time also a new opera festival (Helsinki Opera Festival), which is meant to bring the latest winds of European opera field to Finland. The festival is created in collaboration with the Comic Opera Helsinki, whose partner this year is the Polish orchestra and choir Capella Cracoviensis. They performed Stanislaw Moniuszko’s opera “Halka” in Kulttuuritalo. Unfortunately the audience hasn’t, at least yet, found the festival, since not a lot of tickets were sold to the performances. One must hope that in the future marketing efforts will succeed better, so that the festival will not shrivel to death sooner than expected.
At Kulttuuritalo we saw the earlier, two-act version of Halka, which hasn’t been shown in Finland before. Moniuszko’s music is rather romantic and based on what I heard, I could well imagine going to see the longer version with four acts one day.
The story line of the opera is not exactly distinctive. It tells about a young pheasant girl Halka, who has fallen in love with the son of a rich landowner Janusz. The boy seduces the girls, plays with her affections and, of course, in the end marries a rich girl called Zofia. Disappointed in love, Halka drowns herself in the river.
Taking into account the restrictions of the Kulttuuritalo stage and its acoustics that sometimes lost the sounds, the performance was good. Capella Cracoviens Choir was worth listening to and all the soloists did well. My favourite was Natalia Kawałek as Halka. Moniuszko had written her lovely arias. I liked the second act better than the first: Halka had her most beautiful arias in it and Kawałek did justice to them both vocally and as an actress. Sebastian Szumski also did an impressive job as the calculating lizard Janusz.
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