The Orchestra of the FNO, Hannu Lintu & Karita Mattila

Helsinki Music Centre, Concert Hall
Thu 15.8.2024 19:00
Duration: 90 min, interval

The Orchestra of the Finnish National Opera has moved audiences for over 60 years. Starting in autumn 2024, the Orchestra charms the audience at Musiikkitalo with a unique four-concert series. Each concert promises orchestral music gems and songs interpreted by top artists from all over the world. The concert programme consists of works that reflect the different aspects of life and human emotions. 

The first concert on 15 August is part of the Helsinki Festival programme. The concert’s opening song, Sofia Gubaidulina’s The Wrath of God, will be performed for the first time in Finland. 

Orchestra of the Finnish National Opera
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Karita Mattila, soprano

Sofia Gubaidulina: The Wrath of God
Ludwig van Beethoven: Ah! Perfido! op. 65 

Richard Wagner: Liebestod from the opera Tristan und Isolde
Aleksandr Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy

Tradition vs. avant-garde, East vs. West, individual vs. collective. Opposites are emblematic of the music of Sofia Gubaidulina, who grew up in Soviet Tatarstan. Her production combines Russian and Central-Asian influences with Western art music tradition. 

Gubaidulina studied piano and composition at the Kazan Conservatory and continued her studies at the Moscow Conservatory until 1959. Dmitri Shostakovich, who evaluated her final examination in Moscow, encouraged the young avant-gardist to continue on her path, even though the other members of the panel thought her music “incorrect”. 

Gubaidulina’s music was barely performed and certainly not recorded under Soviet rule. Under the regime’s pressure, she had to settle for a style based on folk music. Any kind of “Western bourgeois decadence modernism” was out of the question. Gubaidulina first received permission to travel to the West in 1985 and finally moved to Hamburg in 1992. 

The Wrath of God (2019) is a massive orchestral avalanche. Dedicated to Beethoven, the music is built around repeating, threatening choirs of brass. These develop into earth-shaking tutti sections framed by bitterly mocking elements. As stern in tone as befits the title, this masterpiece premiered in Vienna in November 2020.

Ah! Perfido is a monologue by a woman abandoned by her lover. In its recitative and aria, she first demands the Gods to punish her unfaithful companion, then begs them to show him mercy and finally offers to die for him.

The dramatic scene begins with a recitative, the text of which is from Pietro Metastasio’s play Achille in Sciro. The lyricist of the second part, the aria “Per pietà, non dirmi addio”, is unknown. The work premiered in Leipzig on 21 November 1796, with soprano Josepha Duschek as the soloist.

A second significant performance took place in December 1808 as part of a benefit concert for Beethoven. The four-hour marathon programme included, for example, the premieres of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. This time, the concert aria’s solo was a disaster due to the stage fright of the 17-year-old replacement soprano.

Beethoven himself mentioned that the piece is best suited to a theatre milieu. The opening recitative is like in an actual opera scene: dramatic lines follow one another in quick bursts. The solo aria changes the mood significantly. The slow orchestral lead, beautiful solo melody, use of the orchestra and overall form have often been said to share features with Mozart’s style. 

Prior to Tristan and Isolde (1859), no one could imagine music having such a strong role in manifesting drama. Richard Wagner carves open the soul of the opera’s titular characters using music. Their doomed love is only fulfilled in death. Liebestod (Love-Death) comprises the finale of the opera.

The famous “Tristan chord” of the opening phrase sounds strange because it and the following dominant remain floating in note space without resolution. The chord recurs several times during different stages of the opera until its final release in Liebestod.

The opera’s tragic events begin as Tristan and Isolde drink a love potion and fall in love. When Isolde’s promised fiancé, king Marke, finds the lovers together, one of his knights mortally wounds Tristan with his sword. 

The Liebestod scene begins with Tristan dying in the arms of Isolde who arrived to tend to him. Isolde falls into ecstasy, her love in death finally fulfilled. The music climaxes as fresh breaths of wind surround Isolde and further as she imagines dying in “the flowing infinity of the world’s breath” (in des Welt-Atems wehendem All). Isolde falls down and the mystical chord of the prelude finally receives its release.

Mystic and visionary – two words that may best describe Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. As a mystic, he represented an attitude of life that seeks immediate connection with divinity. The keyword is ecstasy. Those who have mystic experiences gain, in ecstasy, a feeling of unity with the universe or the divine. But if these mystic experiences cannot be described in words, could they be conjured up through music? This question became an obsession for Scriabin.

By the late 19th century, an idea began to take form that the general scientific and technical progress had left humanity’s spiritual needs unfulfilled. Influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner and Theosophy, Scriabin believed that art – and music in particular – had the power to fill this void.

Scriabin strived for his expressional aims by raising Wagner’s chromaticism to a whole new level. The harmonies of the symphonic poem Le Poème de l’extase (1905–1908) are full of tensions that are only finally released in the C major chord that ends the work. Scriabin unleashes the full power of the massive orchestra only in the end. To balance things out, the piece also includes delicate solos for violin and trumpet.

Despite its focus on ecstasy, the work is carefully structured. It is loosely based on a sonata scheme, even though the general impression is rhapsodic, consisting of different rich orchestral colours and a tight network of motifs. “When you listen to Poème,” Scriabin told his friend Ivan Lipaev, “look straight into the eye of the sun!”

Texts: Pekka Miettinen

The concert is part of the concert series of the Orchestra of the Finnish National Opera at Musiikkitalo, realised with financial support from Hannele and Henrik von Wendt.

During the 2024–2025 season, a four-concert series by the Orchestra of the Finnish National Opera will be organised, with sopranos Karita Mattila and Kristine Opolais, tenor Josep Calleja, bass-baritone Johan Reuter and bass Mika Kares as soloists. The orchestra will be conducted by Chief Conductor Hannu Lintu and young international stars Roderick Cox and Aivis Greters, visiting Helsinki for the first time ever.