Photo: Juuso Westerlund
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
Libretto Juha Siltanen
Conductor Sauli Saarinen / Nils Schweckendiek
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
Executive Producer Ceyda Berk-Söderblom
Photo: Maarit Kytöharju
Photo: Juuso Westerlund
Photo: Juuso Westerlund
Photo: Juuso Westerlund