Irene in the Helsinki Music Center, the 31st of December, 2019

Can the year end better than with an excellent baroque opera? The question is rather rhetoric, since in 2019 in Helsinki there is no doubt about the correct answer. The answer is a clear no. The Helsinki Baroque Orchestra (HeBo) played with top-class soloists Johann Adolph Hasse’s opera “Irene” from 1738. This opera was forgotten after its first performances and only brought to stage now by HeBo. Big thanks you to HeBo!

The main character of the opera is empress Irene of Byzantium, who is secretly in love with young Niceforo. Irene’s son Isacio, on the other hand, wants to overthrow Irene and also tries to blackmail Niceforo’s sister Eudossa to marry him. And, of course, Eudossa is not too happy about the warm feelings between Irene and Niceforo. In addition to all this, Eudossa’s and Niceforo’s father Oreste has his own agenda about the Empire and he wants Isacio to finally become the Emperor. But when he finds out that Isacio and Eudossa will marry, he has to reveal that he switched his own son with the crown price when they were babies. So, Niceforo is Irene’s son and Isacio and Eudossa are siblings, which means that the whole setup changes. Irene and Niceforo recognize that their feelings towards each other are the love of mother and son. And now Irene is fully prepared to leave the throne to his real son. Niceforo and Eudossa love each other and the bad guys of the story, that is Oreste and Isacio, are exiled. 

From the point of view of music, Irene was a beautiful opera and HeBo gave an ecstatic performance. The opera was full of delicious details and frankly speaking the da capo -style, that is so typical for operas of that era, could at times in my opinion been even more frequent, since I could easily have listened to some parts one more time. Conductor (he also played the harpsichord occasionally) Aapo Häkkinen was in honour of the year’s end like a living flame. I could have watched his work even longer; I have rarely enjoyed following the conductor’s work this much!

The cherry on the cake were the soloists. The role of Irene was sung by Julia Lezhneva. Her voice in the demanding arias can only be admired even if the role was rather low so she did not need to use her full scale. Eudossa’s role was sung by Estonian Dara Savinova and sung well. I especially enjoyed how she put her soul in the performance. She had learned the role so well, that she really did not need to look at the notes at all. The male roles were sung by countertenors: Max Emanuel Cenčič (Niceforo), Bruno de Sá (Isacio) and David DQ Lee (Oreste). Again, I have to say that there are big differences between countertenors. My absolute favourite of these three was Bruno de Sá, whose clear, bright and agile voice was purely stunning in “Irene”. The opera would have been worth seeing only to hear him.

”Irene” was a great end to the operatic year 2019. Pretty much my only critique was about the fact the the soloists only popped to the stage to sing their parts and then left the stage only to return again after a while. The impression was a bit restless and sometimes it felt funny that the singer was clearly singing to another person, who had just walked off the stage. From the point of view of the performance it might have been better, if the performers had mostly sat on the stage waiting for their turn to sing like most concert performances of operas as staged.

For those of you, who live in Finland and have access to the streaming service of Yle Areena, a warm recommendation to listed to the opera; it is available for one month.