In the spring of 2017, I was asked to produce a large cultural event in the municipality of Liminka: the Abraham’s Feast the opera, composed by Jukka Linkola and the lyrics written by Helena Tornberg. Along with Helena, Jouni Prittinen was in charge of directing and choreographed the opera.

The working group consisted of more than a hundred people: in addition to the employees and helpers from the municipality of Liminka, the dance and singing students of the Oulu University of Applied Sciences, local professional performers and the Oulunsalo Ensemble orchestra with symphonic additions were included. My wide-ranging expertise played a key role in making a relatively large and multi-directional opera project succeed with limited resources.

My role as an event producer took the form of a communication channel between a working group of municipal employees and the opera performers. I arranged everything from negotiating the performers’ contracts to determining the dimensions and electricity requirements of the new Liminka Areena stage.

In addition to his work as a producer, I also offered my graphics services for the opera: I redesigned the look of the Abraham’s Feast website (the site is no longer online) and created new advertising graphics, as well as creating the opera’s manual.
I also proofread the opera’s libretto, hyphenated it into the score, and worked on relatively realistic virtual orchestrations of the music to facilitate the rehearsals. In the opera’s performances, I worked as the “right hand” of the mixer and played the sound effects I had designed for the opus.

I made short, high-quality virtual orchestrations from three different pieces of the opera, which I used as a basis for the trailer videos I created for marketing (available on YouTube).

After the opera, I created a private DVD film for the performers and the municipal archives, based of audio and video recordings of the performances.

In the spring of 2018, the opera received two new performances when Helena Tornberg produced the project at her own expense at the Helsinki Music Centre. The performances were pulled through by an almost identical team, so the opera was still well enough in everyone’s memory and we managed with a few rehearsals. We were helped by the Music Centre’s own performance technology team, from whom I learned a lot in a short time while working together.

This time I was the technical producer of the project (e.g. stage maps, sound reproduction, lighting) and Tornberg’s consulting assistant in contract matters. In addition, I designed and implemented a couple of minutes of computer animation, because the necessary props for that particualr scene could not be transported from Liminka to Helsinki.

I also created a completely new website and a revamped trailer video for the Abraham’s Feast for the Helsinki project.