Most new Finnish operas are in Finnish, so the first performance of a new Finnish children’s opera in Swedish (second national language of Finland) is an occasion. Fantasy opera “Tomtebobarnen” (Children of the Forest) is based on Elsa Beskow’s well-known fairy tale and it tells about an elf family with four children, who live in the forest.
There is no real story in the opera, but it just tells about some everyday occurrences in the life of the family or the children. For an adult audience the story may be a little bit too “everyday”, so that at least I was glancing at my watch more frequently than usually, but for children it was probably quite interesting. The libretto was written by Hanna Åkerfelt.
The composer was Kimmo Ruotsala. The music as such was not so memorable, but it did have its interesting moments. The music had influences from many sources. The director of the opera was Dan Söderholm.
The best part of the performance was the visual side. Since the cast of the opera consisted – in addition to elves – of different animals (frogs, an owl, a bat, snails, rabbits) and some fairy tale characters (fairies and a forest troll), there was a lot to look at. Based on the comments of the children sitting near me, not all children recognized the animals, but I thought the costumes were really apt.
Among the singers, there were a couple of veterans (Monica Groop and Juha Kotilainen) and lots of young singers. Once again I liked the performance of Kotilainen as the Elf Father. He was able to make even a fairy tale character to sound believable. Riku Pelo as the forest troll was also good. And Alexis Oksi was able to make the youngest elf child Tusse quite cute.
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