Arts: Savonlinna Opera Festival
Finns a l'eau
Rodney MIInes
And not just opera. While stage performances in the courtyard of the island fortress (a little draughty this year) suggest a National Festival, with all those magnificent, rock-firm Finnish singers providing a welcome antidote to the screeching and wobbling so often heard elsewhere, the ever-expanding concert side of the Festival IS taking on an increasingly international flavour.
This seems a good mix. The largely native, opera-starved audience is properly and responsibly served, and treated to music-making of the highest order as well. The Polish Chamber Orchestra gave three reputedly very fast concerts before I arrived, and were followed by Brigitte Fassbaender, Peter Schreier, Girard Souzay, Elly Ameling, the Melos Quartet and Emil Gilels. Nothing wrong with that Miss Fassbaender, rather unyielding in too much Mahler (not an afternoon com
Poser), enchanted with Milhaud's 'Chansons de Negresse' and some soupy Liszt. Miss Ameling gave us over two hours of unaffected, sweetly-turned, straight Schubert: sheer heaven. The overwhelming effect of Schreier's similarly classical, elean-limned Schone Miillerin was somewhat compromised by Irwin Gage's fatuous grimacing at the piano. I don't know which role he was interpreting — the brook, the huntsman, or at times the Miillerin — but too much of his playing suggested the millstones. Must remember to sit where I can't see him next time. Two days later Dalton Baldwin gave an object lesson in the art of accompaniment in the Souzay recital. At sixty, the French baritone cannot always Make his voice bend to his will, and the way Baldwin encouraged, helped and covered from the keyboard, as well as playing exquisitely, was heart-warming. So was Souzay's singing after the initial shock of hearing the voice in comparatively parlous State. Yet this great artist still has plenty to teach us. He can make Gounod sound like a first-rate composer and in Ravel (the Don Quixote songs) and Berlioz he demonstrated a complete, if not a unique command of stylistic nuance. Some of his ways — freedom of portamento and rhythm — are less convincing when applied to the German Lied. Why bother with it? The audience responded with genuine but not starry-eyed generosity.
There are other, almost fringe-type activities. For the first time there were informal (and free) lunchtime recitals in the beautiful old brick granary, given by soloists of the Festival orchestra. This involved no Playing-down: at one, the bassoonist Juhani
Tapaninen chatted about his instrument, answered questions from the floor (literally — no chairs) and played a meaty, atonal Rautavarra sonata without frightening the horses. The Festival also sees the finals of the annual Timo Mustakallio singing prize, worth £2000. It was won this year by a desperately shy twenty-one-year-old, Anitta Ranta, who in `Tu che di gel sei cinta' sounded like an Eva Turner in the making. God grant that she makes it. The runner-up awards were given not to those with the loudest voices, but to those with most interpretational promise. Very good. Behind the scenes,the veteran Maestro Luigi Ricci, friend of Puccini, Mascagni and Gigli, gives an annual course for soloists, and all the Festival singers scurry off for their lessons — in private, alas. The Arto Noras 'cello-classes also run through fortnight, and the long afternoon when the twenty-odd students showed their wares was staggering. All were highly accomplished musicians, and two rather more than that. Ritta Pesola, looking not a day over fourteen, played a J.C. Bach adagio with a depth of feeling that verged upon the indecent. Then a youth in none-too-clean T-shirt and rolled-up jeans sauntered in to shift, I thought, the piano. Not so: he seized his instrument, came on like Sargant's Suggia (playing with every inch of his body) and played the Shostakovich sonata in D like an angel to the silent accompaniment of 200 jaws falling open. His name is Martti Rousi — watch out for it.
Despite so much hugely satisfying music-making (and music-listening), Savonlinna remains an Opera Festival. This year there were only revivals — financial retrenchment — but all performances were sold-out. The surprise to me was Kokkonen's The Last Temptations, the moment-of-death flash-back over the life of the Finnish revivalist preacher Paavo Routsalainen, which I found a trifle severe last year. But now Sakari Puurunen's production seemed clearer in outline and more crisply executed, and Ulf SOderblom's conducting more incisive and flowing. Kokkonen's score is brilliantly organised; I don't know if it is possible to use a hymn • tune as a tone-row, but if it is then he has done it, and I much admire his daring in these astringent times in writing a passage of such inspired lyricism as that which ends the first act.
Most important, Martti Talvela has deepened his interpretation of the main role, giving greater expression to the agonising self-doubt and the humility of the man to balance his arrogance and fundamentalist confidence. This is now a true voyage of the soul, and a very moving one — a performance worth crossing Europe to catch.
So is Jussi Jalas's conducting of Die ZauberflOte, the fruit of a lifetime's experience, understanding and love of Mozart. Maybe not all of the singing is festival standard — whatever that may be — but August Everding's production works beautifully as a whole, and Timo Honkonen's Papageno was riotously funny even in Finnish. Boris Godunov, given in a conflation of Mussorgsky A and B, was very properly dominated by the magnificent chorus in Jack Witikka's spectacular wide-screen staging. It is the people of Russia who act as curtain at the end, slowly moving on stage during the postlude to conceal the Tsar's corpse. The bass parts are of course safe in the hands of a series of gigantic Finns, though Heikki Toivanen's Boris was not always ideally secure (coincidentally or not, he was commuting to Bayreuth between performances). There was also an utterly memorable Hostess from Anita Valkki, and a pingingly heroic Dmitri from Peter Lindroos, infinitely more at ease than in his appearances at Covent Garden.
There is a sense of frustration in my ravings about this Festival in that the rate of exchange — and less than generous government subsidy — make it as expensive for the British to attend as others with more reclame. But those who want first-rate singing, imaginative production, concerts of international stature, and all in an atmosphere of one part unpretentiousness to five parts sheer devotion to the cause need look no further. I certainly don't intend to.
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