Related Research Articles
Johan Jonatan "Jussi" Björling was a Swedish tenor. One of the leading operatic singers of the 20th century, Björling appeared for many years at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and less frequently at the major European opera houses, including the Royal Opera House in London and La Scala in Milan.
The music of Finland can be roughly divided into categories of folk music, classical and contemporary art music, and contemporary popular music.
Josep Maria Carreras i Coll, better known as José Carreras, is a Spanish operatic tenor who is particularly known for his performances in the operas of Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini.
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s.
Einojuhani Rautavaara was a Finnish composer of classical music. He is among the most notable Finnish composers since Jean Sibelius (1865–1957).
The Finnish National Opera and Ballet is a Finnish opera company and ballet company based in Helsinki. It is headquartered in the Opera House on the coast of the Töölönlahti bay in Töölö, which opened in 1993, and is state-owned through Senate Properties. The Opera House features two auditoriums, the main auditorium with 1,350, seats and a smaller studio auditorium with 300–500 seats.
Rusalka, Op. 114, is an opera by Antonín Dvořák. The Czech libretto was written by the poet Jaroslav Kvapil (1868–1950) based on the fairy tales of Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová. A rusalka is a water sprite from Slavic mythology, usually inhabiting a lake or river. Rusalka was the ninth opera Dvořák composed. It is one of the most successful Czech operas, and represents a cornerstone of the repertoire of Czech opera houses.
Tarja Soile Susanna Turunen-Cabuli, known professionally as Tarja Turunen or simply Tarja, is a Finnish heavy metal singer-songwriter. She is a soprano with a three octave range.
Martti Olavi Talvela was a Finnish operatic bass.
Perttu Päivö Kullervo Kivilaakso is a cello player for Finnish band Apocalyptica. Like fellow band members Eicca Toppinen and Paavo Lötjönen, he attended Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. He plays a German 19th century cello; he started playing the cello when he was 5 years old and joined Apocalyptica for their third studio album Cult. Kivilaakso played in Apocalyptica's 1995 line up, but he was concentrating on his studies when the band began their professional career. At the end of 1999 he came back, switching places with Antero Manninen, who then went to play in a classical orchestra.
Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer.
Mikko Franck is a Finnish conductor and violinist.
Un re in ascolto is an opera by Luciano Berio, who also wrote the Italian libretto. It is based on a short story from the collection Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino, but incorporates excerpts from Friedrich Einsiedel's 1778 libretto for an opera based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. This became Die Geisterinsel in 1798, set to music written by Friedrich Fleischmann. In addition, W. H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest was a source.
The Sun Comes Up is a 1949 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Technicolor picture with Lassie. Jeanette MacDonald had been off the screen for five years until her return in Three Daring Daughters (1948), but The Sun Comes Up was to be her last. In it, she had to share the screen not with an up-and-coming younger actress but with a very popular animal star. Although her retreat from a film career can be blamed largely on an increasingly debilitating heart ailment, MacDonald continued to make concert and TV appearances after this. Her last radio performance was a broadcast version of this same story on Screen Guild Theater in March 1950.
The Horseman is an opera in three acts by Aulis Sallinen, based on a libretto by Paavo Haavikko. It was premiered by the Savonlinna Opera Festival on 17 June 1975 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Olavinlinna Castle, and is the first of Sallinen's operas, and is replete with heavy symbolism and historical allegories. According to George Loomis, writing in The New York Times, the work "is widely credited for helping to precipitate a wave of Finnish operas".
Lokikirja is the fifth box set by Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish. It was released on 18 November 2009. This box set contains the remastered edition of Angels Fall First, the regular editions of the other six Nightwish studio albums and the special edition of Over the Hills and Far Away. The album was in pre-order at the Nightwish-Shop website. "Lokikirja" is Finnish for "logbook".
Once Upon a Tour was the third world tour by Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish, in 2004 and 2005, to promote the release of their fifth album, Once, released June 7, 2004. A new greatest hits compilation, Highest Hopes, was also released to tie in with the tour. The albums combined with the band's most expansive merchandise campaign by Nuclear Blast Records meant this tour was heralded as the band's most important in many years. Many of the band's songs had not been played in a long time.
Juha is a three-act opera by Aarre Merikanto, with a Finnish libretto by Aino Ackté based on the 1911 novel of the same name by Juhani Aho. Although completed by 1922, it was only finally staged at the music college in Lahti on 28 October 1963. The story is a drama of a love triangle: the older husband Juha, his young wife Marja, and her seducer the merchant Shemeikka. Set in the 1880s in Kainuu in northern Finland, the human tragedy is based around the harsh realities of a farming community and the clash of their lifestyle with the more worldly nomadic Karelians, represented by Shemeikka.
Kullervo is an opera in two acts, Op. 61, composed by Aulis Sallinen to his own libretto based on the story of Kullervo in the Finnish epic Kalevala. The opera premiered on 25 February 1992 at the Los Angeles Music Center.
Anita Välkki was a Finnish dramatic soprano who had an international career in major roles at leading opera houses.
References
- ↑ Opera Today review "The House of the Sun, which he subtitled a tragedia buffa. The CD booklet features a well-written essay by the composer on the creation of his opera. The inspiration for the libretto came from a tragic but bizarre news story: two older ladies were found frozen to death in their trash-filled home. Daughters of a family that had fled the Russian revolution, they had never integrated into Finnish society, and once they could no longer afford servants, they simply shut themselves away until death claimed them."
