Rautavaara: Aleksis Kivi
Jorma Hynninen (baritone) - Aleksis Kivi
Lasse Poysti
(speaking role) - August Ahlqvist
Eeva-Liisa Saarinen (mezzo-soprano) -
Charlotta
Helena Juntunen (soprano) - Hilda
Gabriel Suovanen (baritone) -
Young Aleksis
Jussi Miilunpalo (tenor) - Junki
Peter Nordman (baritone) -
Siivo
Hanu Ilmolahti (bass) - Kristo
Lassi Virtanen (tenor) -
Krasse
Arttu Kataja (bass) - Olvi
Jeremais Erkkila (tenor) - Kuku
Jyvaskyla Sinfonia
Markus Lehtinen (conductor)
Ondine
The more one hears the backlog of operas by the 74-year-old Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, the more one wonders if opera is his core genre, as opposed to the symphonies, concertos and choral works of recent years that have brought him international fame. Though opera lovers probably have every reason to distrust a composer who writes his own librettos, Rautavaara as composer and librettist has demonstrated a keen sense — better, perhaps, than any other living opera composer's — for knowing when characters should speak or sing and for devising dramatic situations that bloom under the expansive touch of music. These operas also reflect a restless mind: there's no particular formula apparent between the layered, theatrically abstract, often spellbinding Thomas and the straightforward narrative of his heartfelt TV opera, Gift of the Magi.
However, the 1997 Aleksis Kivi, his latest opera to be recorded, shows how even a musico-dramatist of considerable gifts can fail to create theatrical heat. If Beethoven's Fidelio can be described as a "rescue opera," Aleksis Kivi is definitely a "victim opera." The title character (1834–72) is considered the father of Finnish literature, but in his lifetime, he was destroyed by a bitter, powerful rival, poet August Ahlqvist (1826–89) and succumbed to drink and insanity prior to his death at age 38. The opera's form is that of a flashback, showing the mad, hallucinating Kivi at the end of his life and then proceeding with a recounting of his rise and fall, with the title character's young and old selves played by two different singers.
Little in Rautavaara's previous output quite prepares you for how clichéd the opera is. The story is told in the broadest of strokes: Ahlqvist — seen in a number of manifestations, including a doctor supposedly treating Kivi's illness, and in more hallucinatory moments, Satan himself — is so prosaic that he doesn't even sing.
There are the expected mad scenes, as well as a Traviata-esque barroom sequence where Kivi drives away the one woman who has been loyal to him, grandly stating that he prefers to drink. All the dialogue is telegraphic: characters speak with an awareness that can come only with historic hindsight.
The musical style is typical late Rautavaara: restrained, melodic, all-around attractive and often lacking tension. Even some of the opera's most important scenes have a serene backdrop of consonant string chords that drain the situation of its theatricality. Moments of madness have clarinets in a state of glissando and violins with bi-tonal tremolos and finger slides. Ahlqvist's speeches are recited with a boorishness never imagined by Wagner's Beckmesser, and are so obvious as to be uninteresting.
Yet at every turn, Rautavaara seems so purposeful in his approach, you have to ask yourself if he is attempting to forge a new approach toward his stage works, perhaps his own version of opera as historic pageant. If so, the composer seems to be counting on his audience bringing a certain amount of sympathy to the opera house, or in this case, the recording. He sees no reason to develop Kivi as anything but a stock artistic figure or to convince us of his literary worth — and that's a lot to assume for a non-Finnish audience. This may be Rautavaara's counterpart to Britten's Owen Wingrave (a late-period work in that composer's output that places social agenda before dramatic plausibility).
There are moments when Rautavaara's compositional personality defies the opera's
bad theatrical sense. When the young and old versions of Kivi meet in the
final moments of the opera, you'd want them to have something important to say
to each other, which they don't, aside from spouting a lot of poetry about golden
fields. However, the situation fires Rautavaara's musical imagination in ways
that more than justify the presence of the scene. As is so often the case in
opera, music justifies any number of theatrical lapses — even if the lapses
are serious enough that Aleksis, while a notable addition to the Rautavaara
discography, is not likely to be revisited with great frequency, even by the
composer's admirers.
