For the first hundred years of its existence, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta has had a sparse performance record outside Russia, only gaining popularity in the West over the past few decades. Part of its challenge is its brevity. For the first Iolanta staged in Helsinki in over a century, Finnish National Opera made the intriguing choice of adding only a short work, staging Sibelius’ tone poem Luonnotar as an introduction; a short, sweet and purposeful pairing that delivers all of the musical excellence and dramatic tension of a grand opera with no need for intermission.
Luonnotar, based on material from the Kalevala, is a partial cosmogony. A primordial creator, Luonnotar exists within the natural forces of sea and sky, at one point lifting a knee from beneath the waves so that a bird may have a place to build a nest. But Luonnotar is agitated by the warmth of life and topples the nest from her knee, the eggs shattering and becoming things of beauty: the firmament, the moon, the stars.
Iolanta, a one-act wonder, tells the story of a blind princess raised from birth with no knowledge of her disability, of light, or of sight. As she comes of age, her father reaches his last attempt at finding a cure: a mystical doctor who conditions her recovery on her desire to see. When a stranger, Vaudémont, stumbles within Iolanta’s usually well-guarded gates, he sets into motion the sequence of forbidden knowledge, illicit love and the willingness towards self-sacrifice that ultimately allow her to see.
Director Antony McDonald’s minimal staging and simple costumes articulate the unifying premise clearly and without pedantry. Starting from a backdrop of a forest with projected waves weaving through the trees, Luonnotar takes her place behind rocks, which she climbs while narrating her famous tale. She lifts a small house and places it upon a stone. As the piece comes to a close, she escorts the house through a door in the wooded backdrop, over which appears a Russian warning against trespassers, the orchestra moving immediately into Iolanta’s Introduction. When the forest is lifted and we see the stage, the house once cradled in Luonnotar’s hands has grown, now home to Iolanta in her edenic, if extremely grey, garden where a huge cast of attendants entertain her.
McDonald’s Iolanta is not pitiful, but strong-minded and firmly suspicious of what she is – and is not – told. And yet the staging makes the audience acutely aware of our own pity and attachment to eyesight, with endless streams of bright fresh flowers in bunches, bouquets and crowns, all variety and color, that she cannot see. The hired help, who she refers to as friends, wear neutrals, as if embarrassed by their own vision. As Iolanta approaches love, maturity and her own ability to see through her blossoming relationship with Vaudémont, the stage blooms into color.
Despite her short time on stage, tremendous soprano Silja Aalto drew tears easily in Luonnotar. With a voice at once jarringly lovely, rich and unapologetic, she navigated both the punishingly broad vocal range of the piece and the equally challenging emotional range with confidence, showing mastery of the symbolic waters and airs in their myriad combinations.
Nina Bezu’s soprano was perfectly appropriate for Iolanta: bright and youthful, yet steady, but the standout performance during the work was from tenor Edgaras Montvidas, whose singing and acting both crafted an absolutely dreamy Vaudémont. Strong and impeccably nuanced, his voice was warm and controlled, carrying the emotion and the deep philosophical conviction of the character. In particular, his duet with Bezu following the test of the roses and the subsequent revelation of Iolanta’s condition was tender and romantically convincing. They did not let the moment drift by as purely saccharine, but upheld it as a debate about truly transcendent beliefs.
While the powerful voices of Aalto, Mika Kares as King René and Koit Soasepp as a fabulous Bertrand needed no help to project clearly over the pit, Bezu’s understandably more delicate Iolanta and Montvidas’ occasionally gentle Vaudémont were more than once overpowered by the orchestra. The music was a delight to hear, especially the crisp high woodwinds and borderline indulgent duo of harps, but conductor Kristian Sallinen could have balanced dynamics better, especially to help the voices in the opening scene of Iolanta, sandwiched between the on-stage string quartet and the pit. The choral performances were intensely beautiful and uncommonly clear, with a final scene that felt like a religious event, rather than the performance of one.
