Helsinki Contemporary Opera Festival offers this year many extremely interesting operas, many of them new operas. One of the operas that I had been waiting for was composer Heta Aho’s opera ”Tove J”. The opera has been composed for three mezzosopranos, so it offers a great chance to hear how different voices even in the same category can sound.
The opera tells
about the creator of the Moomin Tove Jansson, her struggle between the Moomin
and (what she calls) serious art. But it also tells about her
relationships with Vivica Bandler and Tuulikki Pietilä.
The opera has only a very small orchestra, so mostly it is
about the singers: Elli Vallinoja (Jansson), Ann-Marie Heino (Bandler) and Maiju
Vaahtoluoto (Pietilä). The music itself is not very memorable, but the
charismatic singers make the opera work and at least I liked it. Nothing much
happens in the opera and the stage design is also rather small scale, but the
director Ville Saukkonen has managed to express the tensions in the
relationships quite well, so the audience is kept interested for the whole
duration of the opera (about one hour). All the singers were good and their
singing was a joy to listen to.
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