or the Unexpected Joys and Perils of Singing - a tragic musical fantasy.
Co-composed with Markku Klami. The first full-length puppet opera ever produced in the Nordic countries. Five soloists, seven puppeteers, thirty puppets and the Pori Opera Choir share the stage with the Pori Sinfonietta. A story about love, the gift of song, and the responsibility that talent brings.
Croak - or the Unexpected Joys and Perils of Singing is the first full-length puppet opera ever produced in the Nordic countries. The score was written together with my fellow Finnish composer Markku Klami; the libretto, by Mikhail Brashinsky, draws its language from the wisdom of classical fairytales. It is a tragic musical fantasy about love, the gift of song, and about what happens to a person on whom that gift has been placed.
The production sets thirty puppets, manipulated by seven puppeteers, against five human soloists, the Pori Opera Choir, and the Pori Sinfonietta orchestra, all sharing the same stage. The director, Anna Ivanova-Brashinskaya, has spent much of her career advocating the art of puppeteering in Finland; Croak is a deliberately large-scale demonstration of what serious puppet theatre can do when written for an opera house rather than for a children's stage. The puppets are characters, not props. They sing - through the voices of the soloists - they grieve, they fall in love, and one of them suffers.
Markku and I divided the score by character and by scene, then stitched the two musical voices together. The result is not a hybrid; it is a duet between two compositional sensibilities, mediated by Brashinsky's libretto. There are pure-music passages where the puppets are still and the orchestra carries the entire dramatic weight; there are moments where a puppet sings unaccompanied to its own reflection.
The premiere took place at Promenadi Hall, Pori, on the evening of 9 March 2018, conducted by Nils Schweckendiek. In parallel with the staged performances, the production was recorded in full third-order VR ambisonics by Hans-Peter Gasselseder - one of the first complete operas ever documented at that level of spatial-audio detail. Listening to the recording with a head-tracked headset, the puppets move past you the way they moved past the audience that night.
Croak is a tragic musical fantasy about love, the gift of song, and about the responsibility brought on by talent. From the production materials, Pori Sinfonietta