Mother's Day Concert of Helsinki Baroque Orchestra in the Helsinki Music Centre, the 8th of May, 2022

Helsinki Baroque Orchestra’s Mother’s Day concert was once again a really great experience. I am their huge fan, and the musical world would really be poorer without them. First it looked as if the concert hall would remain half empty, but people came in at the last minute and the hall was almost full, so that many more had found this interesting concert.

The soloists were soprano Liliya Gaysina and violinist/counter tenor Dmitry Sinkovsky, the latter at least being HeBo’s regular visitor.

The concert started with Gaysina’s interpretation of Antonio Vivaldi’s “In furore iustissimae irae”. What a spectacular performance! This piece requires superb voice control in extremely hard patterns, but Gaysina had no difficulties whatsoever to cover everything.  

The next two pieces were Johann Sebastian Bach’s violin concerto G minor (soloist was Sinkovsky) and harpsicord concerto D major (soloist was Aapo Häkkinen). I liked both of them even though they naturally did not contain any singing.  

The last piece was Georg Friedrich Handel’s “Il Duello amoroso”, were Gaysina and Sinkovsky sang together. We had heard Gaysina’s soprano voice already in the beginning of the concert, but now also Sinkovsky sang. He also has a really beautiful voice, so it was a pleasure to listen to it.  

As an encore they sang the duet of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar “Caro! Bella! Più amabile beltà” from Georg Friedrich Handel’s opera ”Giulio Cesare”. A magnificent performance both musically and as an interpretation! No wonder the audience could almost not stop clapping to them.