A “Penderecki Festival” comes to life in Helsinki's opera house in Corona times

I have been reflecting on the music of Krzysztof Penderecki as we recently performed his music for the world premiere of Val Caniparoli’s Jekyll and Hyde at the Finnish National Opera & Ballet. As Maestro Penderecki just recently passed away in his hometown of Krakow only in March of 2020, it is also quite timely and an honor to be immersed in his inventive and articulate musical mind.

To the Finnish National Opera musicians and myself, the ten performances of this new ballet Jekyll & Hyde felt quite like a Penderecki Festival or at least a Polish Music Festival radiating from the Helsinki orchestra pit. While many of Penderecki’s works are used to depict the story of Jekyll & Hyde, we especially focus on his great Third Symphony, playing three of its five movements almost in their entirety. We also played his Arche - the first movement of his First Symphony, selections from his Polish Requiem, his amazing Serenade and the Sinfonietta No. 1. Polish composers Gorecki, Kilar, Chopin and Wieniawski very nicely made up the rest of the ballet as well and with great effect. Yet, the focus in the first and second act revolves around Penderecki’s monumental Third Symphony which is quite like a concerto for orchestra, a virtuosic orchestral showpiece in the vein of Lutoslawski’s or Bartok’s. Being an American conductor based in Europe, working in Finland, it felt quite like an awakening to what is quite another sound world, and one that I felt kinship with.

Because of the October/November 2020 health guidelines we had to rehearse in a very innovative way, recording the portions of the music written for full orchestra a few weeks before the world premiere. What this means is that about 50% of the ballet was performed live by a socially distanced chamber orchestra and the large orchestral works were amplified from the house’s speaker system. All of the music played by the Finnish National Opera & Ballet Orchestra, a world-class group of musicians. Due to Corona restrictions, we also had to deal with recording a seventy piece symphony orchestra with 2 meters separating each musician, many in masks, all in masks when in the hallways, only small groups allowed into the opera’s cafeteria. The only reason these recordings were at all possible is because the Finnish National Opera happens to have a very large orchestra rehearsal room. Yet it was crazy to perform this virtuosic, difficult multi-metered music with a brass and percussion section more or less 30 meters away!

Another interesting facet was that we had to come to work ready to perform from day one. Our recording sessions included no time to waste and the orchestra, recording team and I had to work in performance mode from the beginning, bringing performance energy, exactness and drama to our music-making in the 1st and 2nd reading sessions. This was hard work and exciting. The Finnish Radio Orchestra lent us their chief recording producer Laura Heikinheimo to lead the sessions along with me and by our side was the excellent house sound engineer, Erno Hulkkonen. We all worked absolutely tirelessly and thankfully the recordings came out very well which was so important because we had to listen to ourselves during the performances. It was a very exciting time, we understood we were the only major opera house in Europe putting together a new production in these crazy and challenging Corona times!