If the weather is good Helsinki in August is a most agreeable place to be. The sun is hot, the air is cool, and the nights are mild. And August is the month of the Helsinki Festival, a 17-day celebration that spreads itself over three full weekends. It's primarily a local event - visitors account for only 10 per cent of the total audience of 348,000 - but the flavour of the programming is international.
Helsinki is the capital of a country where state support for the arts is taken very seriously indeed. A city like Lahti, population 96,000, located some 65 miles from the capital, has its own symphony orchestra of international repute, and recently built a new concert hall, a wooden structure that's now said to offer the finest acoustic in Finland. The capital's Alvar Aalto-designed Finlandia Hall, with its intriguingly asymmetrical auditorium, has a dryish acoustic which doesn't make life easy for the performers.
The first of the festival concerts I attended was in the Finlandia Hall, with Esa-Pekka Salonen, currently music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in town to conduct the Helsinki Philharmonic. The big piece chosen for the occasion was John Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music, a work premiered by Salonen and the LAPO in February 1999. At nearly 50 minutes, it's Adams's biggest orchestral work, its title borrowed from the distinction the German writer Friedrich Schiller sought to make in 1795 between "naive" and "sentimental" poets. As Adams explains it, for Schiller, the poet is either himself nature (and thereby naive), or else he seeks nature (and is thereby sentimental).
Compared to the earlier, minimalist-style works by Adams which have been heard in Dublin, the new piece creates an effect as if the earlier style has been taken and knocked out of focus, the gestures blurring and seeping into each other like a wettened water colour, the whole then restored with an alignment which removes the minimalist patterning.
The work is orchestrally lavish, often beautiful in colouristic detail, and clearly strives to touch the heart with a battery of sensual effects. It is both naive and sentimental in the ways the composer wished, and in the everyday meanings of those words, too.
Adams is a composer who sometimes seems to see himself as a white knight rescuing music from the wilder abstractions of the post-war avant-garde. In terms of the emotional immediacy he now strives for, as well as intellectual elaboration, Naive and Sentimental Music is a high-water mark in his output. Salonen's mastery of the music was a joy to behold, though the sound was occasionally hampered by a flatness of profile in the acoustic. Thomas Zehetmair, the rather fussy soloist in Sibelius's Violin Concerto, was heard again, with his string quartet, in a concert at the Sibelius Academy, Europe's third-largest music conservatory, I was told, and the apex of a music education system that's much to be envied, especially by comparison with the desert which is music education provision in Irish schools.
The Zehetmairs performed from memory, a feat I haven't witnessed from a quartet since the Smetana Quartet last did it in Dublin in the 1970s. Their playing is indulgently intense. Hardly a moment passed without vigorous heightening of expressive potential, a process that moved between insight and tiresomeness, as background after background was relentlessly pressured into the foreground. The repertoire, however, was highly interesting. The First Quartet by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, a composer who steadfastly opposed the Nazis in his life and in his music, has that tenor of mourning which can be heard in so much of his work, coupled with a chunky, Bartok-like aggression. Schumann's Quartet in A, Op. 41 No. 3, showed the best and worst of the Zehetmairs' approach - grotesque exaggerations mingled with moments so poignant they lingered in the memory for days.
With Finnish National Opera on its doorstep, and the Savonlinna Opera Festival not too far away, the festival's engagement with opera calls for an imaginative approach. This year's offerings kept to the byways: The Mastersingers of Mars, a new chamber opera by Kimmo Hakola, based on characters from Matti Hagelberg's comics, and the modern premiere of Ulysse (1703) by JeanFery Rebel. With only an English summary to guide me, and without any familiarity with Hagelberg's work, I'm sure that much of the humour of The Mastersingers of Mars went right over my head. But Karla Loppi's production in the Ateneum Hall of the Finnish National Gallery captured a mood somewhere between madcap and topsy-turvy reality in a way that was always visually interesting.
For Ulysse, the young Taite company wanted "to make the audience the stage, and the stage the audience", but couldn't realise their plan because of fire-safety issues. So, instead, director Ville Sandqvist and set designer Carolus Enckell cheekily presented back-stage chaos in the auditorium within the Prologue, and replicated onstage the auditorium of the 19th-century Alexander Theatre, with its unmistakable sweep of doors. It was actually a very engaging evening, superbly sensitive to the awkward pacing of operatic time, and running a helpful, never-overdone series of messages on flags, to clarify situation and action. The singing, even among the principals, was uneven. The Sixth Floor Orchestra under Anssi Matilla was a lot more solid (but sometimes stolid, too), and the chorus a real pleasure.
The handling of Rebel's decidedly non-standard version of Ulysses's return was far from purist - Mercury's intervention was carried out to his own accompaniment on accordion. But the production did actually convey better than many a straighter undertaking might the extravagance and indulgence of the period the work represents.
Bach didn't go uncelebrated in this commemorative year. The Peter Schreier Choir offered the complete motets in the spectacular setting of Temppeliaukio Church, created by blasting a circular hole into a city square, and then adding a roof. It's a space that inspires a sense of quiet awe, a perfect setting, in many ways, for Schreier's highly-personal, urgently vital view of Bach. The motets can often sound like little more than an obstacle course for an ambitious chorus. Schreier and his Finnish singers made real music out of them.
One of the strands in this year's festival was a focus on young virtuosi. Of the four I heard, the most polished was violinist Reka Szilvay (born 1972), whose rather remote perfection suddenly flared into life in the finale of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata.
Among those in their early 20s, baritone Herman Wallen showed the greatest potential in a refreshingly uncliched selection of Heine settings by Robert Franz, Charles Ives, Alban Berg, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Gunter Bialas and Schumann. Pianist Maris Gothoni's as-you-please approach to Bach's Goldberg Variations suggested an imagination that needs serious reining-in, and the similarly angular and attacking style of Mirka Viitala offered questionable support for cellist Tomas Djupsjobacka.
Though it includes theatre, visual art, cinema and circus as well as music and dance, the Helsinki Festival is neither the biggest nor the best-known of Finland's festivals. Its main subsidy comes from the City Council which provides £800,000 of its £2 million budget. Its origins were as an event devoted to the music of Sibelius, and, as current director Risto Nieminen puts it, if you took out the other elements and left only the music, you'd still have a festival. If you took out the music, you wouldn't, an understandable comment about an event that last year featured the City of Birmingham Orchestra, Ensemble InterContemporain, Freiburger Barokorchester, as well as the Helsinki Philharmonic, Finnish Radio, and Lahti Symphony Orchestras.
Unlike Dublin, Helsinki is a city well-resourced in venues for music. Nieminen's problem is finding them free on the days he needs them. But a capital in a country with an active and dynamic cultural policy is not going to rest on its laurels. Lahti's claim to the best hall may soon be challenged. Helsinki is going to build another concert hall, where its own and visiting orchestras can be heard to better advantage than in the Finlandia Hall, which many regard as being more suitable for conferences (though hardly for the convention of Hell's Angels, held in the city last month). The new venue, a few minutes walk away, is scheduled for completion in 2005.
