OPERA REVIEW : A Finnish Invasion at the Music Center

Strange things are happening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this week. Unprecedented things. Weird and vaguely wondrous things. Exotically Nordic things.

The Music Center Opera is staging its first world premiere. Well, staging may be the wrong word. Try hosting .

The centerpiece for this cumbersome, undeniably festive and obviously costly venture has nothing to do with Los Angeles. It isn’t even American. It comes--lock, stock and chorus--from Helsinki.

Helsinki?

Finland isn’t usually regarded as the world’s prime champion of the lyric muse. But the country has produced at least one important operatic composer in recent decades--Aulis Sallinen--and the government does spend a lot of unfettered money on the arts.

The country also happens to have produced a charismatic young conductor named Esa-Pekka Salonen. He isn’t involved in this project--in fact, he has distanced himself from it. Nevertheless, his incipient relationship with Los Angeles seems to have inspired some intriguing geographical associations.

What Finland doesn’t happen to have at the moment is a viable grand-scale opera house. The comfy old one seats only 500. The snazzy new one accommodates 1,500--a lot by sensible European standards--but it isn’t finished yet.

The unfortunate construction delays forced the National Opera to find a new venue for the first performances of Sallinen’s “Kullervo,” a sprawling modernist tragedy that explores the darker side of Finnish folk mythology. Los Angeles, apparently, was the natural choice.

Celebrating the 75th anniversary of their nation’s independence, the ambitious and accommodating Finns agreed to provide the production in toto: cast, conductor, sets, costumes, technicians, some of the stage hands, even a prefabricated commercial recording. The Music Center would have to provide only the orchestra, the theater and the audience. Obviously, the price was right.

The hardest part of the bargain may have involved the audience. Tickets have been offered to Philharmonic subscribers and other special-interest groups at half price. Local advertisements have hawked Sallinen’s music as “accessible,” not to mention “forceful, haunting and distinctive.” Even so, there have been no box-office stampedes. One saw a few empty seats at the beginning of the gala opening-night performance, and quite a few at the beginning of the second act.

Perhaps it didn’t matter. One full house at the Pavilion still equals six full houses at the Finnish National Opera.

Public complacency notwithstanding, the eyes of the music world were on Los Angeles Tuesday night. Journalists flew in not just from Helsinki but from London, San Francisco and even New York--most at the expense of Finnish taxpayers. One Helsinki newspaper sent a photographer and reporter as well as a critic. Television cameras were able to document much of the brouhaha, though little of the actual performance.

The object of all this attention turned out to be a rather forbidding challenge, in its drama as well as its music.

The rather static “Kullervo” libretto--fashioned by Sallinen himself after the epic poetry of “Kalevala” and a play by Aleksis Kivi--is a convoluted, introspective essay in alienation and betrayal. It involves bloody violence and even some incestuous sex, but most of the action takes place offstage. The inherent lore may arouse instant recognition with sympathetic Scandinavian audiences, but it tends to mystify innocent Americans, even when they are aided by supertitles.

On second hearing (the press was invited to the dress rehearsal on Sunday), Sallinen’s music seems a hodgepodge. His eclecticism is brilliantly constructed, to be sure, and it is occasionally illuminated with flashes of inspiration. Still, a hodgepodge is a hodgepodge.

For much of the first act--an act that lasts 75 very long, very ponderous minutes--Sallinen chugs along with canny explorations of familiar post-romantic idioms. He toys with the inheritance of Sibelius sentiment, with Mahlerian expansion, with piquant accents reminiscent of Prokofiev and with theatrically strategic dissonance. He makes canny use of Leitmotif quotation (frequently citing a theme that may or may not be intended to invoke Agamemnon in Strauss’ “Elektra”). In moments of extreme agitation, he stirs in some aggressive Stravinsky primitivism.

The composer wields a large orchestral apparatus with considerable flexibility, and occasionally thickens the symphonic soup with a well-integrated synthesizer. He builds on the grinding tension of extended pedal points and knows all about the cathartic advantage of delayed cadential resolutions.

Sallinen writes often gripping, sometimes tellingly strident music for his chorus, which functions as a Greek chorus in this context. He assigns a more constricted, speech-oriented cantilena to his soloists, some of whom must contend with heavy orchestral competition and awkward tessituras.

The grim exposition of the first act temporarily gives way, at the outset of the second, to some gimmicky stylistic detours. Ghost voices haunt Kullervo’s dream via portentous Sprechgesang . A blind minstrel grabs a convenient microphone to warble an overextended mock-pop ballad. Soon, however, we return to modernist cliches.

One has to admire the breadth of Sallinen’s vision. One has to admire the boldness of the choral interludes, the muted pathos of the anti-hero’s monologues, the tortured lyricism of the mother’s aria, the dynamic focus of the mad scene assigned Kimmo, Kullervo’s friend. One has to be moved by the old-fashioned expressive indulgence of the final pages.

Between these moments of fascination, unfortunately, one endures much that seems mechanical and repetitious, monochromatic and pretentious. For long stretches, “Kullervo” seems to value bleakness for its own oppressive sake.

The excellent production was conducted with heroic sensitivity by Ulf Soderblom. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, suitably expanded and unfazed by the complexities at hand, responded to his urgings with eager bravura.

Kalle Holmberg’s staging scheme, predicated on clever abstraction and trendy post-modern images, almost reduced the drama to oratorio. The director did banish the usual operatic mannerisms, however, from his disciplined ensemble of singing actors.

Mans Hedstrom’s simple unit set relegated much of the action to steps in front of a row of exit doors in what looked for all the world like an old movie theater. Pekka Ojamaa’s costumes evaded definition of time by dressing the principals in stylized period attire, the chorus in contemporary mufti.

Jorma Hynninen, the only member of the cast well-known in this country, dominated the performance with his tautly understated portrayal of the agonized Kullervo. A crafty lyric tenor named Jorma Silvasti commanded instant sympathy as Kimmo. Vesa-Matti Loiri mustered proper cynicism for the narrative of the Blind Singer.

Anna-Lisa Jakobsson exerted easy erotic allure as Kullervo’s fatal victim. Eeva-Liisa Saarinen as Kullervo’s mother and Paula Etelavuori as Unto’s wife coped honorably with the ongoing threat of vocal strain.

Effective support was provided in secondary roles by Juha Kotilainen, Pertti Makela, Martti Wallen, Satu Vihavainen, Marko Putkonen, Esa Ruuttunen, and Matti Heinikari. The not-so-massive chorus, trained by Matti Heroja, performed with massive gusto.

The audience may have shrunk as the evening progressed, but those who stayed to the end cheered lustily.