Jaakko Kuusisto, Ice (2019)

And now for something completely different.  This is based on a best-selling Finnish novel (an opera based on Anna Kavan's Ice would be extremelydifferent). It's possibly the best-selling Finnish novel, if I understand aright. It's the first Finnish-language opera I've seen (whoo!), and also the most recently-composed--the Finnish National Opera and Ballet premier is on Operavision--until September 4 only! See it while you can!

It's a simple story: it's 1947, and everyone's still kind of shellshocked from The Recent Unpleasantness. A priest, Petter, and his wife Mona and daughter Sanna arrive at a remote archipeligo off Finland where he's going to minister. Not a lot happens: they integrate into the community, and there's some quiet family drama, as well as some semi-supernatural stuff about the spirits of the drowned. But, as this page puts it, "the priest knows nothing about ice, nor the way it gives in when you least expect."

Yes, it's uneventful for the most part, which has not, in my experience, been a great recipe for an opera. But I actually really like this one, certainly more so than any other contemporary opera I've seen. The music is very lush and shimmery, very effectively giving it that icy feel. There aren't really any traditional arias here (although there is some great choral work); it proceeds more or less like a Wagner opera, with a lot of dialogue and little monologuing. I was a little iffy at first, but I quickly got drawn into it, and without spoiling anything, the climax is extremely effective. I will say that there's one part that didn't exactly work for me: there's a Russian refugee who's consumed with trying to find word of the son she was forced to leave behind, and while it's supposed to serve as a sort of counterpoint to the priest's story, it feels very poorly integrated into the whole. In general, I would say that I strongly suspect that the novel does a lot more to develop the details of the secondary characters and daily life in the islands; here things are basically just hinted at. Like, there's apparently a thing where the people from the west and east islands don't like each other, but it's never detailed and never goes anywhere. An opera naturally does a lot of simplification, and for the most part this does a decent job at that, but it's like an iceberg: you only see the top, but you know there's a hell of a lot more to it than that. And then climate change destroys it, so there's not. Hurray!

Well, as I said, I liked this a lot. Maybe they'll put it out on DVD, but I kind of doubt that there will ever be another recorded performance to watch, so don't miss out.