The original performance date of the opera “All the Truths We Cannot See, A Chernobyl Story” by Uljas Pulkkis was moved to this spring. It has been made in collaboration between the Sibelius Academy and the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music so that all roles have both Finnish and American singers.
Even though
the opera is based on a true event, that is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
accident, it tells in addition to people also about the animals around the
power plant. The main human characters are nature lover Svitlana (Lana)
Fedorovna, her fiancé Maksym (Max) Smirnov, who works at the power plant and
director of the power plant Allura. Each
person has their own agenda. To Lana the nature is the most important thing in the world, to Allura
her career is her driving force and Max believes he can control nuclear power,
but something goes wrong and there is an explosion. Animals, whose environment
has been destroyed by people, feel that the abandoned and radiating area is
again theirs. But nobody – not the people, nor the animals – survive the explosion
and its effects without tragic consequences.
Because the
performance was postponed to this spring, the opera became even more current,
when Russia attacked Ukraine in February. The Chernobyl power plant and the
vulnerability of nuclear power plants in general during conflicts became issues
and human beings with their unscrupulous targets have been in most of our minds.
This opera leaves without doubt a little confused feeling behind it. Even though
the themes are important and touching, the opera itself is so full of
everything that the big picture suffers. You can find in the music clear influence
of several other composers and there is even a surplus of characters in the
opera, which in a way is understandable, when the opera has been composed for music
students and the aim is to have lots of roles for students to sing. But this
meant that there was material in the opera for more than one opera. The
director Ken Cazan has created a rather nicely working opera, even though some
of the Wagner references were a bit too obvious. I did not like Sean Cawelti’s
projections that much, since they were partly blurry and sometimes it was
difficult to understand what they were supposed to represent. But Pia Lasonen’s
costume design was great, even though I did not recognize all the animals the
first time I saw them.
Unfortunately,
this opera, like so many other performances lately, had some absent singers. Two
singers had fallen ill, and their roles were sung from the side. But for once I
can say that there were no weak links in the performance, which is a bit unusual
for a student performance. This time it was slightly difficult for me to choose
my favourite amongst the singers, but perhaps the most thrilling character was
Allura, performed by Christine Marie Li. She was ruthless and calculating and
totally concentrating on her career. She had no difficulties to blame others
for the difficulties, especially if she was at the same time able to destroy potential
competitors. Li was able to bring just the right amount of toughness and
credibility in this admittedly a tad one-sided character.
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