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Wagner's Lohengrin performed at the Savonlinna Opera Festival last year. This year Hong Kong Arts Festival audiences have a chance to see it here.

Finland's nimble chorus to close out Hong Kong Arts Festival

LIFE

The Savonlinna Opera Chorus has a rather unusual membership requirement.

Not only do you have to be a brilliant singer - this huge Finnish ensemble, which will appear as the finale of this year's Hong Kong Arts Festival (March 22) and in this year's production of Wagner's huge opera (March 21 and 23), is one of the best choirs in Northern Europe - but you also have to be able to climb up and down steep ladders and crawl through a small window in your underwear (costumes have to go on later, once you're through).

The Savonlinna Opera Chorus forms every summer for one of the most extraordinary opera festivals in the world. It is held in a 15th-century castle on a tiny island in Finland's lake district, in the eastern part of the country.

It is common for singers to spend summer after summer there enjoying the thrill that comes from performing for up to 2,262 people in a tented theatre with surprisingly world-class acoustics.

Not to mention the camaraderie that is a result of the 50 or so people sharing a cramped dressing-room chorus tent and an arrangement that means to enter stage right you must climb through a large window, go outside to a landing stage beside the lake, climb a ladder, and squeeze through a second window.

That window is so small a few years ago a rather large bass soloist got stuck during a rehearsal and had to be pushed by one of his daughters and pulled by another, Winnie the Pooh-like.

The castle layout is unusual. It was built in a hurry. The Russians were patrolling in the 1470s and the locals wanted something to defend them quickly. They brought in 16 stonemasons from all over Europe, and arranged for peasants to row large stones to the little island as a form of tax.

By 1907, when the world-famous Finnish soprano Aino Ackte visited one summer, it was in partial ruins but she fell in love with it. She had a vision of an opera festival where Finnish works were premiered, and the first festival in 1912 was supported entirely by her money. Savonlinna with its lake so clean and warm for swimming in July and August proved a wonderful place for a summer festival.

In the 18 years that followed, five festivals were organised, but from 1930, following the Depression and then through the world war, there was no singing.

The opera festival was revived in the 1960s when the castle was undergoing the biggest restoration ever done in Finland, and by the time its 500-year anniversary was celebrated in 1975, a summer opera festival was a regular fixture.

It is a chorus with memories, although only one of the chorus members coming to Hong Kong can remember the summers before the canvas roof was installed in 1973, where operas frequently had to be cancelled because of rain.

"In 1967 my parents were in the chorus," says assistant chorus master Olli Tuunanen, who himself joined the chorus in 1978. "I was a little boy and every summer it was my playground."

The rain used to come into the orchestra pit and the violins would stop immediately, he recalls, as they could be ruined by water, with the other instruments following gradually.

"I remember a performance of the Finnish opera . It began to rain. One violin stopped first, and then another and then another and yet the conductor kept going until they all stopped. It was like a Haydn Farewell Symphony with fewer and fewer instruments playing."

For the grand finale of the Arts Festival, the chorus will embrace the bicentennials of both Wagner and Verdi this year. The programme includes excerpts from Wagner's and , as well as Verdi's .

"We want there to be a sense of laughter and joy in the gala festival which officially closes the festival," Tuunanen says.

Savonlinna Opera Festival Choir Lohengrin

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Finland's nimble chorus to close out Hong Kong festival
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