A Horsey Name and What Remained in the Helsinki Music Centre (Sonore stage), the 20th of August, 2020

I suppose already the name of the performance (A Horsey Name and What Remained) should have told me that I should expect a bit different musical performance by the students of the Sibelius Academy. J. Martina Roos had written the story based on the play of Kalle Luotonen which had got its origin from the novel of Anton Chekhov. The connection to the Chekhov novel had eventually become kind of thin, but it did exist. The performance itself was about three orphan siblings – Anna, Andrey and Volodya and their nanny. The children quarrel, dream about joining the circus and reminisce about their parents. It contained both speech and singing.

In the advertisements it was only mentioned that there is no entrance fee to the performance, but there was no note about any ticket restrictions. Fortunately, I was at Sonore quite early as I often am, since almost all seats were reserved for the invited guests and there were only a couple of tickets for other people. The excellent Covid-19 safety measures of Sonore, of course, affected the number of tickets available, but it would have been good to have a mention of the extremely small number of existing tickets in the advertisements.

The diploma works of the Sibelius Academy students are always interesting to see and to try to guess which one(s) of the singers manage to reach bigger roles in operas in the future. This time I would guess that the ladies are more likely to become bigger stars than the gentlemen. My personal favourite was the nanny (Marianne Montonen). She has an interestingly full-bodied voice that has promise of further development. Virva Puumala was also good in the role of Anna and I especially liked her rendition of Liza’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades” (Ах, истомилась я горем).

There was a short description of how the performance was made in the programme leaflet and suffice it to say that there were plenty of obstacles on its way during the Covid-19 spring: several performers left the production and schedules changed. That must have affected the result and I also ended up to the conclusion that I wasn’t perhaps the main target group of this production, since I did not quite fall in love with it. But it is great that young artists make different type of things and not just the same old “Cosi fan tutte´” by Mozart.  We don’t always have to over the moon with every production, but they still are worth seeing.