Opera in the defensive fortress
Savonlinna, the island of Southern Savonia in Finland, which has held a demanding opera festival every July since 1912 in its earthquake-like medieval Olavinlinna Castle, has been a prime example of climatic chaos these past few weeks. If four years ago it experienced a summer so cold that the parade ground where the event is held required the violinist to wear gloves, this time it has been unusually hot for three weeks. And the circus tent used as a roof during the summer rains—sometimes so heavy that the noise forces the performance to be stopped—has had a sauna effect on the more than two thousand people who can fit in the venue.
So much so that the audience would come to the opera wearing their bathing suits under their dresses and, upon exiting, jump straight into Lake Saimaa, which kisses the rocks of this ancient fortress. Even the orchestra musicians would leave the pit during the intervals to take a dip in the backstage dock where the sets are brought in by boat. Only then did they feel ready to sweat in unison again playing Macbeth , Boris Godunov ... Or Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen, which closed the festival yesterday and which the Peralada Festival has arranged as this year's guest. And as happened a couple of decades ago, when the Liceu presented L'elisir d'amore , Catalan creativity has once again been placed at the heart of European opera. Not in vain was Savonlinna named Best Festival at the 2024 International Opera Awards.
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For Peralada, exporting this humorous production—Xavier Sabata's disguised Queen of England—is a breath of fresh air. When he premiered it in 2022, he couldn't imagine it would be his last large-scale production, since, while waiting to renovate its auditorium, it has become a festival of big stars but small venues. Its artistic director, Oriol Aguilà, offered the production to his counterpart at Savolinna, musical director Ville Matvejeff, who quickly saw an opportunity to break the curse that Baroque opera doesn't attract a wide audience and doesn't fill venues as large as this Nordic castle: the same number of seats as the Liceu and with superior acoustics.
In fact, in its more than one hundred editions, Savonlinna has only dared to program Handel's Giulio Cesare , and with modern instruments. Although the operatic tradition is very strong in those latitudes, the eight million euro budget for staging various operas and a singing competition (this one in the town's historic wooden theater) is 80% covered by the box office, so the margin for audience decline is small.
The Finnish public has discovered that Baroque can be fun thanks to Peralada's version of this Purcell work.
Savonlinna Opera FestivalEspecially when you're 60 km from the Russian border, although the people at Happy Savonlinna prefer not to think about it. The waters of this lake, the fifth largest in Europe and scattered across 13,700 islands, connect with those of the Russian Ladoga, which is just around the corner. It was this proximity that led to the construction of the fortress in the 15th century, due to the threat of invasion by Ivan the Great. Now, the war in Ukraine has led to a loss of Russian visitors to an area where, unlike eastern Iceland, Swedish is not spoken as a second language, but rather the language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The festival is focusing on attracting German audiences to compensate.
On a backstage visit, one understands why artists scheduled to perform here are asked a questionnaire: Do you suffer from vertigo? Do you have trouble sharing a dressing room?... When the venue is designed for the defense, the rooms are very small and don't communicate with each other. The chorus has to enter the stage on their knees through a tunnel from the pier. And go up and down uneven steps... And all of this with Xavier Sabata on drag queen platforms...
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What the organizers couldn't have imagined was that Joan Anton Rechi's crazy production of The Fairy Queen would cause such hilarity and a stir among their audience. "This has never been done here before; it breaks all the rules, but it's wonderful," said one audience member about the fresh yet disciplined production. Rechi introduces texts from A Midsummer Night's Dream and pays homage to the genre by transforming Lysander, Hermia, Helena, and Titania into opera icons: Rigoletto, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, and Don Giovanni. These Pirandelian characters even participate in a mini-Eurovision performance with arias for the four seasons. Winter arrives, representing Finland!, while maestro Dani Espasa defends it from the pit leading the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra.
Laughter erupts. It also erupts when Sabata, who is like the fairy queen of the opera's title, dons Elizabeth I's crinoline, Queen Victoria's organza gown, and the little hat that matches Elizabeth II's handbag. "We're not monarchists," a spectator tells her as she greets her subjects in the front row. "I am," Sabata's character replies. Applause and the tapping of feet on the stage awaken nostalgia for those grand nights in Peralada. "It's hard for us to warm up here, but when we do, we're pure fire," a Finnish woman concluded.
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