Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rautavaara: Kaivos; Rimsky-Korsakov: Kashchey the Immortal

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

My programming records indicate I have never before broadcast an opera by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928), although I have featured a sacred choral work of his, the Vigilia (1971) on Palm Sunday, 1999. The composer himself writes, "Kaivos ('The Mine') is perhaps the best opera I have ever written." He makes that pronouncement in his note for the 2011 world premiere recording of Kaivos on the Finnish Ondine record label, the same label that issued his Vigilia in 1998.

Rautavaara was inspired to write his own libretto for "The Mine" after learning about the 1956 uprising in Hungary, which the Soviets so savagely repressed. "The Mine" is about an ill-fated worker revolt in an unnamed country that much resembles Soviet Russia. The opera was televised in Finland on April 10, 1963 with a toned-down wordbook, so as not to offend the Russian communists, who live right next door to Finland and had long sought to dominate the Finns. The opera had to wait almost half a century to be produced again, albeit in concert performance, but with its original libretto restored. The recording was made at Helsinki's Tampere Hall with Hannu Lintu conducting the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra and the Kaivos Chorus of miners and miners' wives. Baritone Jorma Hynninen is the Commissar, the villain of the drama.

There will be ample time remaining to listen to an "Autumnal Parable" in one act: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Kashchey the Immortal (1902). This is another one of Rimsky's Russian fairy tale operas, of shorter duration and on a smaller scale than the others. The fairy tale presented here is very similar to The Firebird, made famous from Stravinsky's ballet music treatment. There is no magic bird, but there definitely is an evil sorcerer.

When Kashchey was revived at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1905, coming as it did in the immediate wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre, the audience read into the story an allegory on the downfall of the Czarist regime. The performance incited a student demonstration, the police stepped in and the opera ended up being banned for a while, much to the composer's chagrin. Kashchey the Immortal was recorded in 1991 with the orchestra, chorus and singing cast of the Bolshoi Theatre, Andrey Chistiakov conducting. Outside Russia this recording was once available through the French label Le Chant du Monde. The Dutch label Brilliant Classics acquired the rights to it and reissued it on a single compact disc in 2013.