COMPOSERS: Sallinen
LABELS: Arthaus Musik
ALBUM TITLE: The Palace
WORKS: The Palace
PERFORMER: Veijo Varpio, Jaana Mäntynen, Saui Tiilikainen, Tom Krause; Savonlinna Opera Festival Chorus & Orchestra/Okko Kamu; dir. Kalle Holmberg (Savonlinna, 1995)
CATALOGUE NO: 102 091
This performance was filmed
during the opera’s premiere run at
Savonlinna in 1995. Though the
DVD is very welcome it confirms
the feeling I had then that The
Palace – which tells the story of a
third-world dictator losing control
– is slightly tangential to the rest
of the Sallinen’s output. Comedy
is the hardest thing to bring off
operatically, and Kalle Holmberg’s
sterile staging is little help. On the
plus side, the filming compensates
for the original production’s lack of
intimacy, with camera-work that
makes the most of a lively cast.
Even the catchy score, a sort of
Sondheim meets Shostakovich,
stands slightly apart from most of
Sallinen’s music, but under Okko
Kamu’s committed baton the strong
singers make an attractive case for
it. It’s hard to feel much for the
characters in a plot based somewhat
clumsily on Mozart’s Entführung and
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Emperor
(itself a black comedy retailing the last
days of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile
Selassie’s court), yet there are some
very involving performances, not least
from the soprano Jäana Mantynen
as a poised Constance and the tenor
Sauli Tiilikainen as the seducer and
usurper Valmonte. The extras may
not give as full a picture of Savonlinna
or Sallinen as they seem to promise,
but they include some fascinating
footage. John Allison