© Aleksi Barrière & Lucia Schmidt

Tuuli Lindeberg, soprano
Elli Vallinoja, mezzo-soprano
Joonatan Pylkkönen, tenor
Niilo Erkkilä, tenor
Waltteri Torikka, baritone
Nicholas Söderlund, bass

12-piece ensemble
Jukka Untamala, musical direction

CREATIVE TEAM:
Aleksi Barrière, dramatization and direction
Étienne Exbrayat, stage and lighting design
Lucia Schmidt, video design
Music theatre collective La Chambre aux échos

Urkuyö ja Aaria’s 40th anniversary summer culminates in the Mahagonny Babylon concert at Tapiola Church. Offering a unique musical and theatrical experience, the performance brings together the spiritual depth of Johann Sebastian Bach with the sharp social satire of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht – and vice versa. Weaving together cantatas from the 18th and 20th centuries, the work leads the audience to Mahagonny, a city abandoned by God. This new staged production created for Tapiola Church reflects a question already posed in the Bible: how can one find hope in a world ruled by injustice, when even prayers receive no direct answers?

The production is directed by internationally acclaimed Aleksi Barrière, whose visual language and precise dramaturgy make the performance both emotionally enchanting and thought-provoking. Barrière’s direction combines theatrical technique, a strong narrative line and aesthetic boldness, creating a distinctive world of its own. The performance is led by violinist-conductor Jukka Untamala, and the outstanding soloists include Tuuli Lindeberg, Elli Vallinoja, Joonatan Pylkkönen, Nicholas Söderlund and Niilo Erkkilä.

In 1927, composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht developed the Mahagonny-Songspiel following the model of Bach’s church cantatas and drawing inspiration from the tradition of the Lamentations. The cantata tells the story of Mahagonny, the city of lost souls – the Babylon of the Wild West. When God arrives to destroy this new Gomorrah, the inhabitants are forced to realize that they are already living in hell. As a prologue, the audience hears Bach’s cantata BWV 46, composed two hundred years earlier, which likewise draws on the material of the Lamentations and presents the paradox of our loneliness: all voices sing together in a choir about their own suffering, almost without noticing that it is precisely this shared suffering that unites them.

At the heart of the performance are the political and spiritual depth of the works and their musical dialogue: Bach’s cantatas and chorales merge seamlessly with Weill’s jazz-influenced musical language, and Bach’s humorous Quodlibet intertwines Mahagonny’s absurdity with the formal world of sacred music. The evening concludes with the chorale prelude An Wasserflüssen Babylon, whose melancholy and chromatic richness offer a moment of meditation within the framework of Bach’s most profound message: even if we do not hear heaven’s answers, we sing of our fears together.

CONCERT DURATION:
Approx. 70 minutes, no intermission.

TICKETS:
Tickets: €15–45 + service fees (from €1.5 at www.lippu.fi)