The autumn
season of the Finnish National Opera was supposed to start with Richard
Wagner’s ”The Valkyrie”, but due to Covid-19 the performances were postponed to
early 2021 and it was announced that there would be a new opera called ”Covid
fan tutte” that would be made and rehearsed in only a couple of months. The
opera would be based on Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” and it would tell about the
Covid-19 spring in Finland. The libretto was written by Minna Lindgren and the
director was Jussi Nikkilä. When the postponement of ”Die Valkyrie” had left
several Finnish Wagner singers without a job and also Karita Mattila had been
left stranded in Finland and she agreed to join the group of soloists, the
opera was to be a guaranteed success.
It is
seldom in Finland that one sees in one production such a bunch of Finnish opera
idols. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen worked with a smaller Finnish National Opera
Orchestra and the Chorus performed on a projected video. The main roles were sung in addition to Karita
Mattila by Johanna Rusanen, Minna-Liisa Värelä, Tommi Hakala, Tuomas Katajala and
Waltteri Torikka. Actress
Sanna-Kaisa Palo had a spoken role as the Interface Manager of the opera house.
As the
subtitle of the opera said, it contained scenes from the Covid-19 spring. The
librettist had squeezed into it pretty much everything possible from government
press conferences, technical difficulties of Microsoft Teams -meetings, remote
schools to eating at home all the time, travel restrictions of opera divas,
face mask purchases and restricting free movement of the elderly. I would say
that the production reminded a stand up performance that was sung in opera
tunes. Some of the jokes were goods, some not so and towards the end the
performance grew a bit stale as is rather common in this kind of performances.
From the
musical point of view the performance was interesting. Salonen and the
orchestra started with ”The Valkyrien”, but soon Palo ordered them to play
Mozart instead, which was the musical cue for the rest of the evening. Not all
the music was from ”Cosi fan tutte”, but there was e.g. Leporello’s famous
catalogue aria from “Don Giovanni”. I thought it was cool to hear Wagner
sopranos sing lyric roles and the established gentlemen also sung their roles
as the professionals they are. Personally I found Tuomas Katajala’s seranade sung
from the yard to his mother, who was locked in her own home, the highlight of
the evening (but I am his huge fan, of course). Karita Mattila sung several
roles in the production (opera diva, elderly lady, deceitful face mask seller,
quack and economist to mention only some of them) and she had a chance to
exaggerate to her heart’s content. She did really superb characters and adapted
her voice to all the different roles.
Sanna-Kaisa
Palo threw herself to the role of a cynical manager, but the sign language
interpreter Outi Huusko, who Finns learned to know from the government press
conferences this spring, really threw herself to the interpreting. She was
absolutely gorgeous in expressing with the signs and facial expressions the
text. She has made people understand the importance of sing language during
this spring in Finland more than anyone else before her and this opera just
proved further how iron hard professional and expressive her work is.
Those of
you who live in Finland can see the recording of the opera also in Yle Areena
if you do not have a chance to go and see it live.
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