Mika Kares and Tapiola Sinfonietta in Tapiola Hall, the 11th of October, 2019

I bought at the last moment a ticket to Friday night’s concert (Songs of Death) of Tapiola Sinfonietta and Mika Kares. The evening began with Tōru Takemitsu’s work “How slow the Wind”. For some reason I would not quite get inside the music, so I cannot really say much about it.

My main lure to the concert was, of course, the Songs and Dances of Death (Песни и пляски смерти) by Modest Mussorgsky. These songs are originally for voice (usually bass or bass-baritone) and piano, but several composers have made orchestrations to them and on Tapiola Sinfonietta used Dmitri Shostakovich’s orchestration, which was a really good choice.

I like the voice of Mika Kares and it was nice to hear him sing these fantastic songs. I wasn’t ecstatic over his performance, since these songs are very demanding to sing and it is very hard to move from the delicate “Lullaby” to the drunken reveling of “Trepak” and further to the belligerent tones of “Field Marshal”. Kares did well but not superbly well. However, I would like to hear him sing these song, say, in ten years’ time, because experience may bring more depth to them.

After the intermission Kares sang one more song, Paavo’s monologue “I cannot open the door” from Joonas Kokkonen’s opera “The Last Temptations”. In this song Kares was feeling at home and I could only think that I would really like to see him sing the whole opera one day.  

The final part of the concert was Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 6 in D minor. The visiting conductor of the evening was Ryan Bancroft, who won the Malko Competition for young conductors in 2018. To my ears he conducted Tapiola Sinfonietta well and it seemed that the rest of the audience enjoyed the evening, too.