Arts
A new master
Rodney Milnes
The Red Line; Men's Rib; Die Csardastarstin (National Opera, Helsinki) Opera is a growth industry in Finland, as it is here, but whereas in Britain the growth is mainly confined to new companies, in Finland it is in new operas. Aulis Sallinen's The Red Line is the third premiere given by the National Opera this year; add to them his previous work The Horseman and Kokkonen's The Last Temptations (both 1975) and you have a remarkable outburst of the exotic and irrational in a small, sober — not quite the mot juste, actually — country. All these operas are to do with Finland's nationhood, comparatively recent politically and hardly less so culturally: they are 'national' operas in the way jhat Peter Grimes is (an unflattering but only too apt evocation of the spirit of old England), or that, more cheerfully, The Cunning Little Vixen and Jenufa are.
The libretto of The Red Line is drawn by Sallinen himself from a classic Finnish novel by Ilmari Kianto published in 1909. Topi and Riika are two barely articulate peasants from the northern backwoods, struggling for a livelihood against the implacable forces of nature, here represented by a marauding bear. With their three children they hover at starvation level and eventually sink beneath it. The background is historical: the first election of 1907 in what was then a Russian grand duchy, and the first in Europe based on universal suffrage. Rejected for poorrelief by the church, Topi and Riika find hope in a phenomenon they cannot even pronounce — 'social democracy'. A professional agitator whips the peasants into a frenzy: if they draw a red line on their voting slips, all their problems will be solved. Proudly husband and wife register their votes. Their problems are not solved: Topi's children die of malnutrition while he is away earning; the bear wakes from hibernation and kills his last cow; he goes to fight it with his bare hands; Riika finds him dead, his throat slit in a red line.
Finns have long memories. There can be few families without knowledge of the sort of conditions depicted in the opera, and there h th were indeed people concerned witoic production who had personal experience„,e them. The Red Line strikes deep ict° national consciousness, perhapsPules it disturbingly recent _past. Politic allY ad proved controversial. The final taboileed showed streamers of blue and white 'nits with red, and many took this to be 074 propaganda. Others remembered the reti the agitator was drawn as a whollycYllyo t manipulator of unlettered penPle' ;fol die-hard conservative could draw ce'hv from the fact that voting for the Left !halost implication equated with having your'best cut by a bear — and to Finns the, „nes symbolises more than just the hostile '°'" of nature. .s„. oil But that all seems irrelevant. In L 'Ileeiet the opera is about two simple people unimaginable pressure, and Salliree04 triumph is that he depicts their Ono inspires compassion without the SW whiff of patronization or sentirnentaliT st this he is Janacek's peer; there is aslittlelo relief in The Red Line as in From the 11°„(ti of the Dead, and however shattered tree ences may be (and was, utterly, bY rhe performances I saw) there scrI2,e, of remains that same indefinable gl151ate optimism, of faith in the indomitability() to human spirit —something that far trail° the glib red ribbon. Sallinen's musical language is here Sr„,-orc as befits the subject, than in the 7,;dit broadly drawn, epic-scale Horseman, remains approachable without in arlY ins. being facile: his ancestors, or rather c°11..50s. are Prokofiev and Shostakovich. ManYL" cl: ical gestures make an unforgettable niee Topi describing his deprived adoleOring (eating bread made from birch bark, sla; d in the logging camp) to a melodic figtItir;esr extraordinary poignancy; the pedclia5 of ing tales of unrest in Russia to a set:the catchy folk tunes; the slimy musica/ his terization of the agitator; Topi asidloal friends how the redline is to be draw11—„,;iite worry, says his wife, the good Czar fci us all pencils; the searing funeral marc",00s the children and the string elegy that fob iv it; the off-stage horns as the cow 1°115.,,,esl terror. Above all, Sallinen's sure ti die craftsmanship is always in evidence, TN work is perfectly structured and pace', Horseman, like so many suceesa„„ftfled operas, could have been a fluke, but I "%co' Line proves that it was not. We have a master among us. oars The company performs in a tinY01 hundred-year-old theatre, a Fabeqe ft'ireat cream and gold holding only 550. This cs of into uncomfortable relief the starialt-alle Kimmo Kivanto's decor and — Hohnberg's grimly unsparing production the ehildren's corpses are borne slowly across the stage, one by one. Finnish singers are 637i0us1Y not allowed in the theatre unless they can act, and the intimacy of the °Pera sentahouse both allowed for dramatic pre tion of miniscule detail and reminded us how much we miss in London's great barns. The Red Line was double cast, and emphatically Th mdouble, not first and second. u e two Topis were Jora Hynninen, a isfPrentelY musical baritone whose beaut ally moulded singing in no way corn, Promised the rugged strength of his portraYal, and Tapani Valtasaari, a less expressive vocal craftsman, perhaps, but one able whose craggy face and deep-set, impenetr eyes suggested the man's inarticulateness even more powerfully. As Riika te had the magnificent Ritva Auvinen, with her Alarm-toned soprano and a face disMtegrating into premature age as blow followed blow; her final expression of uncomPithend ler ing agony is one I shall not forget. colleague Taru Valjakka sang with even greater Mor vibrancy, but her acting seemed e generalised. Eero Erkkila's agitator hss'e i'as a Performance on the Berliner Ensem,, scale a smirking, pill-popping, con !,j escending monster; Usko Viitanen played M less the broadly, but the leering cynicism of character is there in the music. The many sMaller roles were faultlessly played, and the 1 4'1 chi,°rus, every one of them an actor, beyond I Praise. The piece was conducted with the c_oiled tension of a giant spring by Okko ICarriu, one of the first Karaj an competition winners. 1 Ikl b -^a Kuusisto's Man's Rib is a comedy ; fased on a popular play by Maria Jotuni 1914)the rough equivalent of, say, HobChoice. The text is set more or less svtraight (no set numbers) in an easy, con rersational musical style. ere were two seTharkable There about this treatment of ruall-town amorous intrigue. The chemist's wife, suspecting her husband of hankyPanky with his female apprentice, goes off to r _coet habit with the doctor for a month and then
It
as if nothing had happened; that cl:',3uld not, I think, have happened in an r'uglish comedy of the period. The sub-plot istnrinnish Donald McGill: two spinsters of certain age, one plump, one skinny, cornPete for the favours of the local handyman, corn rand it was interesting to see the male of the cies treated as a sex object for a change. 0 Qtes Rib also contains, I believe, the first 4 _peratic fart (on stage, I mean there have iways been plenty in the pit). (sAgain, the piece was beautifully directed 'a ukari Puurunen and Jussi Tapola) and heted, with Mr Eerola as the put-upon hand With Harri Nikonen as the flatulent .:sobbler, Jorma Falck as the cock-sure hus..ati,,d and Pirkko Talola delightful as his i'.seii dramatizing wife. The young audience ,d4glied fit to split its sides. In between the first nights of The Red Line came, of csarird_oui.c..cal choices, Kahnan's operetta Die Wicked just the sort of thing that cked landowners presumably enjoyed on a night out at the theatre. A string of really good schmalzy tunes, a cliché-ridden plot, and the company went at it without apology. I am ashamed to say that along with a predominantly elderly audience I enjoyed every deliciously tatty minute, not least the line of net-stockinged, high-kicking chorus girls, and their male colleagues going through the sort of white-tie, top-hat and cane routines since made immortal in Blazing Saddles.
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