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Laura Åkerlund
Laura Åkerlund (born 1987 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish opera-stage director and pianist. In 2019, she was a finalist for the position of ''Directrice Générale'' at the Opéra de Lyon, and in 2021, she advanced to the final stages of selection for the same role at the Opéra National de Bordeaux. Biography Åkerlund began piano lessons at the age of six and completed her studies privately at the Helsinki Conservatory. She earned a Master of Musicology degree from the University of Helsinki, and later studied opera stage directing at the Sibelius Academy, theater studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, and management and international business at Aalto University. She is fluent in Finnish, English, Swedish, German, and French. In 2017, she founded ''Helsingin Koominen Ooppera'' (Comic Opera Helsinki), Finland’s newest opera house, inspired by the traditions of Paris's Opéra Comique and Berlin's Komische Oper. The institution aims to broaden opera’s accessibili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helsinki, Finland
Helsinki () is the capital and most populous city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipality, with million in the capital region and million in the metropolitan area. As the most populous urban area in Finland, it is the country's most significant centre for politics, education, finance, culture, and research. Helsinki is north of Tallinn, Estonia, east of Stockholm, Sweden, and west of Saint Petersburg, Russia. Helsinki has significant historical connections with these three cities. Together with the cities of Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen—and surrounding commuter towns, including the neighbouring municipality of Sipoo to the east—Helsinki forms a metropolitan area. This area is often considered Finland's only metropolis and is the world's northernmost metropolitan area with over one million inhabitants. Additionally, it is the northernmost capital of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ilkka Kuusisto
Ilkka Taneli Kuusisto (26 April 1933 – 20 February 2025) was a Finnish opera composer, conductor, choirmaster, and organist. He began his career as a church organist, worked for the broadcaster Yle and as artistic director of the publisher Musiikki-Fazer. He was choirmaster of the Finnish National Opera chorus and the Radio Symphony Chorus, and was general manager of the opera from 1984 and 1992. He was one of Finland's most prolific composers of operas, beginning in 1974 with an opera about the Moomins characters, in collaboration with their creator Tove Jansson as librettist and costume designer. Early life and education Kuusisto was born in Helsinki on 26 April 1933, the son of the composer and music educator Taneli Kuusisto. He said later that he became interested in music as a teenager when he first heard jazz. He studied at the Sibelius Academy (now part of the University of the Arts Helsinki), qualifying as an organist in 1954, and as a music teacher in 1958. He studi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Finnish National Opera
The Finnish National Opera and Ballet (; ) is a Finnish opera company and ballet company based in Helsinki. It is headquartered in the Opera House on the coast of the Töölönlahti bay in Töölö, which opened in 1993, and is state-owned through Senate Properties. The Opera House features two auditoriums, the main auditorium with 1,350, seats and a smaller studio auditorium with 300–500 seats. History Regular opera performances began in Finland in 1873 with the founding of the Finnish Opera by Kaarlo Bergbom. Prior to that, opera had been performed in Finland sporadically by touring companies, and on occasion by Finnish amateurs, the first such production being ''The Barber of Seville'' in 1849. However, the Finnish Opera company soon plunged into a financial crisis and folded in 1879. During its six years of operation, Bergbom's opera company had given 450 performances of a total of 26 operas, and the company had managed to demonstrate that opera can be sung in Finnish to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fredrik Pacius
Fredrik Pacius (, ); in German and in Estonian Friedrich Pacius; 19 March 1809 – 8 January 1891) was a German-Finnish composer and conductor who lived most of his life in Finland. He has been called the "Father of Finnish music". Pacius was born in Hamburg. He was appointed music teacher at the University of Helsinki in 1834. In Helsinki he founded a musical society, the student choir Akademiska Sångföreningen and an orchestra. In 1848, Pacius wrote the music to the poem "" by Johan Ludvig Runeberg, which was to become commonly accepted as Finland's national anthem. The same melody was also used for the Estonian national anthem "Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm" and the Livonian ethnic anthem " Min izāmō, min sindimō". In 1852, he composed '' Kung Karls jakt'' (English: ''King Charles' Hunt''; Finnish: ''Kaarle-kuninkaan metsästys''), which was the first Finnish opera, with a libretto in the style of Romantic nationalism, like the national anthem designed to convince Finla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
L'isola Disabitata
' ( English: ''The Uninhabited Island''), Hob. 28/9, is an opera (') by Joseph Haydn, his tenth opera, written for the Eszterházy court and premiered on 6 December 1779. The libretto is the only one by Metastasio set by Haydn. The libretto had been originally set by Giuseppe Bonno (1754, Vienna) and subsequently used by Manuel García. Nino Rota has set excerpts to music as well. The libretto was adapted into French and set by F. I. Beck in Bordeaux in the same year as Haydn as '' L'isle déserte''. A later German version was as a Singspiel ''Die wüste Insel'' (Hob. XXVIII:9). Haydn's work has long been remembered for its dramatic overture, but the rest of the opera did not see print until H. C. Robbins Landon's 1976 edition (only available for rental). A new edition by Thomas J Busse was prepared in 2007 and is now online. The piece is striking for its use of orchestral throughout. Unrelated to Metastasio there is also a libretto of the same title by Carlo Goldoni (usi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn ( ; ; 31 March 173231 May 1809) was an Austrian composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the string quartet and piano trio. His contributions to musical form have led him to be called "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String quartet". Haydn arose from humble origins, the child of working people in a rural village. He established his career first by serving as a chorister at St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna, then through an arduous period as a freelance musician. Eventually he found career success, spending much of his working life as Kapellmeister, music director for the wealthy Esterházy family at their palace of Eszterháza in rural Hungary. Though he had his own orchestra there, it isolated him from other composers and trends in music so that he was, as he put it, "forced to become original". During this period his music circulated widely in publication, eventuall ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Red Line
''The Red Line'' (''Punainen viiva'') is an opera in two acts with music by Aulis Sallinen to a libretto by the composer, which premiered on 30 November 1978 at the Finnish National Opera.Arni E. The Red Line. In: ''The New Grove Dictionary of Opera.'' Macmillan, London and New York, 1997. Based on the 1909 novel ''Punainen viiva'' by Ilmari Kianto (1874–1970), the opera – like the novel – is set in 1907, a watershed year in Finnish history during which its first elections were held, leading eventually to Finnish independence in 1917. Performance history Outside Finland, the opera was performed at several European opera houses, including Sadler's Wells Theatre, London in June 1979, Göteborg and Stockholm in 1980, Zürich in 1981, Moscow, Leningrad and Tallinn in 1982, and in Osnabrück and Dortmund in May 1985, as well as at the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 1983. Bush A. Sallinen's Red Line. ''Performance'', Spring 1981, 29–30. It has been revived several times i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aulis Sallinen
Aulis Heikki Sallinen (born 9 April 1935) is a Finnish contemporary classical music composer. His music has been variously described as "remorselessly harsh", a "beautifully crafted amalgam of several 20th-century styles", and "neo-romantic". Sallinen studied at the Sibelius Academy, where his teachers included Joonas Kokkonen. He has had works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, and has also written seven operas, eight symphonies, concertos for violin, cello, flute, horn, and English horn, as well as several chamber works. He won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1978 for his opera ''Ratsumies'' ('' The Horseman''). Childhood and studies Sallinen was born in Salmi. During his childhood the family moved several times for his father's work, and during the Evacuation of Finnish Karelia in 1944 the family relocated to Uusikaupunki, where he went to school. His first instruments were the violin and the piano. He learned to play both jazz and classical music. He spent much ti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Halka
''Halka'' is an opera by Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko to a libretto written by Włodzimierz Wolski, a young Warsaw poet with radical social views. It is part of the canon of Polish national operas. Performance history The first performance of the two-act version was in a concert performance in Vilnius on 1 January 1848. The staged premiere took place in the same city on 28 February 1854. A four-act version was performed in Warsaw on 1 January 1858. The opera was subsequently produced in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, Russia and Cuba. More recently, in June 2004 the Opera has been staged in Kraków Zakrzówek Nature Park as an outdoor performance with horses, fireworks, special effects, and attendance exceeding 6,000 viewers. It was produced by Krzysztof Jasiński under the musical direction of Wojciech Michniewski, with the ballet and orchestra of the Opera Krakowska and with and Maria Mitrosz alternating in the title role. The opera has been pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanisław Moniuszko
Stanisław Moniuszko (; May 5 (17), 1819 – June 4, 1872) was a Polish composer, conductor, organist and pedagogue. He wrote many popular art songs and operas, including '' The Haunted Manor'' and '' Halka'', and his music is filled with patriotic folk themes of the peoples of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (mainly Poles, Lithuanians and Belarusians). He is generally referred to as "the father of Polish national opera". Since the 1990s Stanisław Moniuszko has been recognized in Belarus as an important figure to Belarusian culture as well. Life Moniuszko was born into a noble landowning family in Ubiel, Minsk Governorate (Russian Empire, now Belarus). His father, Czesław, and his uncle, Ignacy, both served in Napoleon’s army. His first piano teacher was his mother, Elżbieta (Elizabeth) Madżarska of Armenian descent. He later continued his musical education in Warsaw and Minsk, and studied under Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen in Berlin. In 1840, he marri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punkaharju
Punkaharju is a former municipality of Finland. It was consolidated with the town of Savonlinna on January 1, 2013. It was located in the province of Eastern Finland and is part of the Southern Savonia region In geography, regions, otherwise referred to as areas, zones, lands or territories, are portions of the Earth's surface that are broadly divided by physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and .... The municipality had a population of 3,702 (31 December 2012) and covered an area of of which was water. The population density was . The municipality was unilingually Finnish. Finnish Forest Museum Lusto and the Finnish Forest Research Institute are located in Punkaharju, which hosts a research forest park open for visitors. In the park some of the tallest trees in the whole Finland can be found, for example pines in the height of . The Punkaharju Ridge is a famous national landscape protected by a national reserve. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
