Opera in Finland - by special guest author Jussi Salonen

Opera scene in Finland

The opera scene in Finland is very small. There's only one professional house, the National Opera. I think their new productions are pretty good, recently they have started to use more visiting (foreign) singers and it has definately spiced things up a bit. If you have a valid Finnish student card (I don't know if international student cards are accepted), you can buy floor seat ticket for 10 € on the day of the show for main stage, if there's seats available. The normal ticket prices start from around 28€ for adults (50% off if you're a student), I think. In the main stage, there's subtitles usually in Finnish and English (for operetta performed in Finnish, the subtitles are in Finnish and Swedish).

What is there besides National Opera?

In addition to the National Opera, there's some professional opera activity outside Helsinki. In Tampere, they do one opera every year, and they've had very good soloists, last years production of Verdi's Don Carlo featured Camilla Nylund as Elisabetta and Tommi Hakala as Rodrigo. The tickets though can be pricy (for next years Magic Flute, the normal ticket prices are 65/84/98 €), because they don't get as much public funding as the National Opera. There's regional opera societies also in Vaasa, Kokkola, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Mikkeli and Kuopio.

Savonlinna Opera Festival

In the summer time, there's the infamous Savonlinna Opera Festival, in Savonlinna, in Eastern Finland. Their soloists are pretty high scale and the stage is inside a medieval castle (fortress).

Studying Opera

Outside the professional scene, there's some schools that make student productions. The only opera program in Finland is in the Sibelius Academy where I study at the moment. There's usually one fully staged production with orchestra and one "black box" production (with piano accompaniment) per year. In the Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (AMK) in Helsinki, they tend to do one or two operas every year and there's some opera done at least in the music programs of AMK's in Tampere, Oulu, Turku and Kuopio.