Concert for Peace in the Helsinki Music Centre, the 31st of August, 2022

The classical music concerts of the Helsinki Festival have not sold as well as before and it is assumed that at least partly the reason behind this is that people are nowadays buying tickets at the last minute. The only sold-out concert was the Concert for Peace of the Finnish Radio Symphonic Orchestra (conductor Hannu Lintu). In addition to the Helsinki Music Centre Choir the concert had four soloists: soprano Helena Juntunen, mezzosoprano Tuija Knihtilä, tenor Tuomas Katajala and baritone Arttu Kataja. The ticket revenues were sent via the Red Cross to Ukraine.

The programme consisted of works somehow related to the theme of the concert. The first piece was Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima”. Even though I am not a huge friend of modern music, since I do not really understand it that well, this piece was exciting. Only strings played it and at times each string was playing its own melody (if it can be called melody?). And when every single string instrument in a symphony orchestra plays a different theme, it sounds quite wild, but I liked it a lot. It was also super interesting to follow Hannu Lintu during this piece, since his movements were totally different from other pieces in the concert.

For a third time in less that a week I also got to hear songs by Gustav Mahler. Fortunately they were in each concert different songs. The Mahler song soloists were Kataja and Knihtilä. Both are great singers, but this time especially Kataja’s recital skills made an impression.  

When you look at the list of soloists, you can surely expect high quality and you can only be a bit sorry that in the second half of the concert, which consisted of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Requiem”, there was not so much to sing for them. The choir, however, has great numbers and the Helsinki Music Centre Choir certainly made them justice.