A group of students from the Sibelius Academy had decided to brighten the life of the friends of opera with two earlier in Finland unseen short operas by Ned Rorem. There was room for even more music lovers in the audience, but the marketing of the operas was so minimalistic that I am not at all surprised if most people had not even heard of the project. The production included soprano Yolanda Harding, soprano Emma Hartikainen, mezzosoprano Lotta Pylkäs, tenor Niilo Erkkilä, baritone Sakari Topi and pianist Reetta Järä.
At first, they performed an opera called “Three sisters who
were not sisters”. It told about five children, who decided to play a murder
game, where one after another they died (and resurrected) and the murderer
remained a bit of a mystery, too. Slightly absurd work, great music and
enthusiastic performers made at least on me a positive impression.
The second opera by Rorem was ”Bertha”, which Rorem composed
for the Metropolitan Opera as a children’s opera. When the opera became ready,
Met rejected it, which does not surprise me really, since the opera was a bit
unusual to be a children’s opera. It tells about the queen of Norway, Bertha,
who is rather crazy and loves war. She does all kinds of insane things to be
able to continue fighting wars and again the stage is continuously full of
corpses. “Bertha” was even more absurd than the first opera of the evening, but
the audience had fun watching it. Lotta Pylkäs was hilarious as Bertha and the
direction of Martina Roos was stellar. I had never before seen any operas by
Rorem, but based on these two works, I could definitely go and see one of his
full-length operas, too.
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