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COMING UP IN AUGUST 2010 YUKIO MISHIMA - JUHA T. KOSKINEN Opera in three acts, based on Yukio Mishima's play Characters:
Love and sadism, passion and hate "If your husband tells you to turn into a dog, will you turn into a dog? France, 1772. Faithful Madame de Sade is waiting for her husband's long prison sentence to end, only to abandon him the very moment he is free at last. In this story seen through the eyes of a woman, the principal character is, after all, a man. The licentious Marquis de Sade, who remains off-stage throughout the opera, pervades the thoughts and actions of six women of his life. The women undergo transformations, at times coming into painful contact with each other, at times breaking away. Although the Revolution nears and finally erupts, it seems to have little effect on the lives of the noblewomen isolated in their salon. In the end it nevertheless turns all their relationships upside down, just like the Marquis shattered his prison from within, using the power of his writings. According to the composer, the opera is an endless labyrinth of metamorphoses, colours, scents and mental images. Extremely delicate and erotically charged, it embraces the characters' psychological complexity and suppressed emotions. Juha T. Koskinen on his work: Despite his physical absence from the scene, the Marquis de Sade is constantly at the center of events – and of the opera itself. As society and personal illusions crumble, the only vision of the world that remains is one born of the Marquis' writing in prison. The female characters of the opera join in a haunting chorus: "The world in which we live is the world created by the Marquis de Sade". Stylistically, the opera is a blend of decadent rococo and the non-linear forms of an imaginary variant of Noh drama. The polished surface of the musical texture is punctuated and shattered by brutal strikes of the whip. In the epilogue, the Marquis' "sacred light" breaks out through cracks and fault lines in the social order. - Juha T. Koskinen, 2010 Performed in Finnish Performance dates: Tickets 15/25 euros from Lippupiste.fi Will be performed in
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