FLASH FLASH

THE TWO DEATHS OF ANDY WARHOL

FLASH FLASH is a portrait of the American artist Andy Warhol – a lonely man surrounded by the masses. Warhol’s various existences – always scandalous – as a painter, filmmaker, media personality, and a thinker, crystallise many of the cultural and societal changes that characterise the most recent iteration of the Western cultural paradigm. Also insinuating their way into the picture are the United States and the Western way of life, along with their engine – consumerism. What in Warhol’s time was flamboyant fiction has become our reality.

Flash Flash is an incandescent requiem that encompasses – just as Warhol’s art does – serenity and passion, religious art and pornography, trash and diamonds. The opera depicts The Modern Man who flirts with destruction and death, and is incessantly desirous of big effects and ease, of voyeurism and cheap melodrama, of buying and selling – all presented in a gilded frame: the world of opera, or opera as the world.

The opera’s at once seductively melodious, yet also occasionally wholly pop-inflected pulse takes its beat from the rhythms and intonations of speech. Nuorvala utilises an unusual microtonal tuning system, known as just intonation to imbue the music with a fascinating sense of the unreal.

Composer Juhani Nuorvala´s and librettist Juha Siltanen’s FLASH FLASH is an exceptional opera. The opus was completed over a decade ago, but it will only now be premiered. Despite never being staged, the work has already achieved mythical status. Composers have been studying the score, the audience has been feverishly awaiting the debut; and finally, in February 2019, the opera, the stage and the audience will have their ultimate union.

Composer Juhani Nuorvala Libretto Juha Siltanen Conductor Sauli Saarinen (7th & 8th of May) / Nils Schweckendiek  (10th & 11th of May) Director Erik Söderblom Set design Reeta Tuoresmäki Lighting & video design Teo Lanerva Costume design Iida Ukkola Sound design Kalev Tiits, Marko Myöhänen

Performers David Hackston (tenor), Sampo Haapaniemi (bass), Varvara Merras-Häyrynen (mezzo), Martti Anttila (baritone), Tuuli Lindeberg (soprano), Ari Kauppila (tap dancer)

NYKY Ensemble Sibelius Academy Centre for Music and Technology

Photo Juuso Westerlund

The performce on Saturday 11th of May will be broadcasted live on Yle Areena and later on Yle Teema.