Kaivos sounds like a powerful experience…

Hannu Lintu’s forces perform with conviction. …there is notable work from trenchant tenor Mati Turi as Marko, a hotheaded—and later wounded and delirious—young miner, and from fine, elegant-sounding bass-baritone Jaakko Kortekangas as the Priest. © 2012 Opera News Read complete review

Rautavaara’s first opera Kaivos is a compact, though powerful work that communicates in the most direct way through its strongly expressive music and tight dramaturgy. Kaivos may well be Rautavaara’s finest opera. © MusicWeb International

I wanted to hear this disc because I like much of Rautavaara’s music but had never heard a complete opera by him. Kaivos, a pretty depressing story told in fairly bleak and depressing music, was performed on Finnish TV in 1963 but never recorded until now.

Rautavaara’s first opera Kaivos (“The Mine”) had a rather long and chequered genesis. The composer began thinking about it in 1957 when he heard a story about miners besieged in the mine where they worked, trapped in the depths of the earth. Some time later when the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation launched an opera competition Rautavaara recalled the story of the rebellious miners and set to work writing his own libretto—something he was to do for all his later operas. The bulk of the composition was done in the late fifties and early sixties. The competition jury chose Rautavaara’s opera for first place, but it was another work that was eventually announced as the winner whereas Rautavaara only received a diploma. This was during one of Finland’s most difficult historical periods, that of the so-called “Finlandisation” during which one had to avoid any all-too-direct opposition with the mighty neighbour. Moreover the political content of the opera was likely to bring memories of the then quite recent and brutally repressed Hungarian Uprising. Nevertheless the then director of the Finnish National Opera took an interest in the work and spent some time with Rautavaara to revise the opera to make it more politically correct. In fact the main change was to make the Commissar into a Prefect and to modify the phrase “Save them from the sickle” into “Save them from ruin”. The opera, however, was not staged then but was broadcast by the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation in April 1963. At the time this recording was made (2010), the opera was still awaiting its premiere in a staged production. In the meantime, however, the composer planned to revise and expand the opera. Actually I have a rather old list of works published by the Finnish Music Information Centre stating that Kaivos was under revision and that the revised version would play for one hour and forty minutes, but the work remained mostly unchanged and the only difference is the change of the Prefect back to a Commissar!

Thus Kaivos is a compact and concise work in three short acts that actually tell us all we have to be told without any lingering and going straight to the point. In the first act the miners rebel against the dictatorship of the Party and one of them tears a portrait of “The Leader” into pieces. This may remind you of things witnessed fairly recently. The Commissar represents the Party and, although they have made him a prisoner, the miners obviously still fear him. They need a leader and they think that Simon should be the one to lead them and to free them. After the miners’ enthusiasm has cooled down the priest tries to persuade Simon either to make peace with the authorities or to flee because the revolt would destroy the mine and its workers. Simon believes that he has no choice: “Either they might fail now because I leave them or even if I choose to lead them”. The second act is the dramatic core of the opera. Distant rifle fire and machimore....

Rautavaara’s first opera receives its first performances almost 50 years on

This is obviously hardly great literature, and it makes for a messy libretto. The music is another matter entirely. Rautavaara’s score is lyrical, romantic, and lush—thoroughly musical and completely absorbing. The notes rather simplistically bring up Berg as a model, but the music sounds nothing like Berg or anyone else even remotely Viennese. Instead, it sounds like Rautavaara writing a 12-tone piece, and I can’t imagine a better compliment. I couldn’t help thinking that if Rautavaara had chosen to spend his career writing 12-tone music (and I’m glad he didn’t), he might have been the greatest 12-tone composer in history. Be that as it may, this is a fascinating document of Cold War angst, and the comparison between it and a work like Nono’s Intolleranza (reviewed above), written at almost the same time, is more than instructive. Finnish-English libretto included. I hear no evidence of an audience. Singing is good, as is orchestral performance.

The Great Jorma Hynninen is in untarnished voice as the dictator figure. The commissar; the bass Hanu Niemelä is a dark Simon (the former partisan, an ambivalent leader of the rebelling miners): and the mezzo-tinted soprano Johanna Rusanen-Kartano a powerful Ira, his compromised lover

Voici un opéra qu’on pourrait appeler néo-veriste, un vrai chef-d’oeuvre, dont Ondine présente le premier enregistrement discographique.

Rautavaara, I am discovering, is a composer of some depth and breadth. His 1962 opera Kaivos (The Mine) (Ondine 1174-2) illustrates this to me. It involves a dramatic story set “somewhere in Europe” in the ’50s. A group of miners engage in an illegal strike. They are directed by outside forces but find that while those forces have managed to set things in motion, they cannot give the miners support to see the action through. The leaders of the strike are left at the crossroads. Give up, fight on to a probable death? As Rautavaara states in the liner notes, the universal theme of human choice in the midst of crisis is dramatically played out.

The performance on this disk is the first on CD and follows the first and only staging of the work thus far.

Still going strong at age 82, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara is among the 20th—and now 21st-century’s greatest opera composers. He’s written brilliant bio-operas about Vincent Van Gogh and the infamous Rasputin; this first recording of his very first opera, written a half-century ago, is another ear-opener. A compact thriller clocking in at a fleet 75 minutes, The Mine combines genuine suspense, taut drama and brilliant vocal writing for soloists and chorus. A stellar cast of Rautavaara regulars, led by bass Jorma Hynninen, shines throughout, as does the Kaivos Chorus and Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Hannu Lintu.