The Snow King and the Black Madonna in Espoo Cultural Centre (Tapiola Hall), the 4th of November, 2018

Composer Iiro Ollila’s work ”The Snow King and the Black Madonna” was shown in the Espoo Cultural Centre’s Tapiola Hall. This work (it was called a musical drama) was originally composed in the honour of the 200^th anniversary of Zachris Topelius – a Finnish author and poet. The first performances took place in Western Finland, in Seinäjoki, but now it was time to have one performance in the capital city region, in Espoo. Director Vesa Tapio Valo was also responsible for the libretto and visualization. The conductor of the Seinäjoki City Orchestra was the composer himself and the chorus of the Seinäjoki operatic society also took part in the performance. It is wonderful that such an original work has been performed in more than one place, so that as many people as possible have had a chance to see it.

The story of “The Snow King and the Black Madonna” is based in works of Zachris Topelius (Tales of a Barber-Surgeon, Royal Children of the Stars and Regina von Emmeritz). By combining parts of these three stories the librettist has created a rather weird saga, where Topelius meets on an alien planet the second horseman of the Apocalypse on his red horse from the Revelation and Regina von Emmeritz plans to assassinate the enemy of the true faith (Catholic church) – king Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden. The performance ends in a rather obvious (and totally unnecessary) anti-war declaration. 

I did like the music of the piece. Ollila had managed to create interesting music that was, however, easy to listen to and the Seinäjoki City Orchestra sounded very good despite its small size. The chorus also had a lot of beautiful music to sing, but I am relatively certain that it would have sounded even better if the chorus had been bigger. I can only imagine, how impressive the Latin prayers would have sounded sung by a full scale chorus.

Jussi Lehtipuu sang the role of Gustavus II Adolphus and Tuuli Lindeberg that of Regina von Emmeritz. Both performed like true professionals and were a pleasure to listen to. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Kimmo Blom in the role of Niemand Niemals. His background is in hard rock and why not. There are a lot of great hard rock tenors only in Finland, who are able to sing quite well. Unfortunately the role of Niemand Niemals was a totally wrong role for Blom. As long as he sang the lower notes, he was ok, but the higher notes were rather awful. And equally unfortunately the role of Niemand Niemals was quite big, so we were forced to listen to these high notes far too frequently.