Finger of fate pointed Lord of the Rings music towards Finland
Värttinä were discovered largely by chance to compose the music for Toronto production
By Pirkko Kotirinta in Toronto
The stretched limos glide away from the Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto towards a luxury hotel in the city, in the early hours of Friday morning.
Behind the smoked glass in a few of the limousines are the musicians from the Finnish folk band Värttinä, along with their avec companions. The curtain has come down on the world première of the stage adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and it is time for the post-show party.
With the benefit of hindsight, it looks as if this is how it was meant to be: when the time came to make a musical version of J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Middle Earth trilogy for the stage, its composers should come from Finland; Tolkien himself often acknowledged the inspiration of the Finnish language and the national epic Kalevala in the creation of his fantasy novel.
"Of course, I know, it seems now as though that was what we planned!" exclaims Christopher Nightingale, who is responsible for orchestrating the music to the massive production.
"But maybe it was fate! It's interesting that Tolkien was drawn to Finland and we were drawn to Finland. It just seemed the right thing to do. It is bizarre, actually."
When they set out on the stage project, the team did not know of Tolkien's Finnish connections. Nightingale already had his eye on the other main composer of the piece, the hot West End property and composer of Indian "Bollywood" film music A.R. Rahman. He had worked with Rahman on the Bombay Dreams hit musical in London.
But something different was also required.
"We knew that we wanted something quite different for the show. To be honest with you, we weren't absolutely sure what that was. But we thought we'd know it when we heard it!"
In particular the creative crew were looking for something to express the darker sides of Tolkien's epic.
"It's very easy to be so clichéd with that. We thought Värttinä's music was fantastic, a non-clichéd but disturbing version of the evil side of things in the drama."
What was also clear from the outset was that music was to play a very pivotal role in the show, but the makers were themselves surprised at how closely this in fact imitates Tolkien's own approach.
"I was knocked out with the amount of music Tolkien described in the book. It [music] really is an integral part of the world he described", Nightingale continues.
Tom Waits' Black Rider was an initial touchtone - the song even takes its name from the Ringwraiths, the dark followers of Sauron in the trilogy. But Waits was not the answer.
Instead, the makers began to look around from the ethnic music and world-music canon: they listened to everything from gypsy music to Bulgarian, Celtic, and Scandinavian sounds, until Nightingale's assistant John Havu happened on a copy of Värttinä's album Ilmatar, and in particular a track named Äijö. That did it.
After many twists and turns along the way, The Lord of the Rings has been brought to the stage in Toronto, seen by many as the third most-important location for English-language theatre after London and New York.
Now the Canadian city can beat its breast at having brought the megaproduction to life. The budget for what has been described as "the world's most costly theatrical production" is said to run o more than EUR 20 million.
Everything about it is BIG: there are around sixty performers on stage, the visual presentation by Rob Howell is quite staggering, and in additional to music and traditional theatre there are acrobats, circus numbers, and a wealth of special effects in play.
"The Lord of the Rings is hugely significant on the international level because this is the world première and Toronto will have this a year before it goes anywhere else", says the city's Cultural Director Rita Davies.
Ontario has put nearly 2 million euros into the project. "I don't think that they have done this ever before. They were persuaded to invest because of the tourism impact. SARS and also the events of 9/11 really, really brought about a big hit on Toronto's economy, which affected our theatres, obviously the hotels, and other areas of the economy. Lot of efforts were made to bring back the tourists."
For the musicians, The Lord of the Rings has meant a lot of hard work and some new challenges, too.
"We have eight shows a week. Monday is the one day we have off. On Saturdays and Wednesdays there are two shows, with a matinee and an evening performance." the afternoons", explains Anne Lindsay.
"But we have a lot of fun! We can also improvise in some places, it's very nice to be able to do that!"
Lindsay plays in an 18-piece orchestra, and takes the classical and folk fiddle roles, and she also plays two more obscure instruments in the shape of the Finnish 3-stringed bowed lyre known as a jouhikko and the Swedish nyckelharpa.
"I guess I had quite a reputation already in Toronto as a folk fiddler, but they also knew that I had played a lot classical music, so the main question would be was I interested to learn new instruments as well", says Lindsay. "I was very eager to participate! But when the instrument [the jouhikko] arrived and I saw it, I was kind of scared at first!"
She had not the slightest idea how the instrument should be played, and it was only after searching the Internet to find a copy of the only jouhikko music album in existence - naturally a Finnish one - that she began to learn the ropes.
"I found the instrument just fascinating. The sound is very raw and primitive, but I just found it so charming that it just sort of endeared itself to me very early on, which was a good thing because it made it easy to keep practising."
She was helped on her way by Värttinä member Lassi Logrén, who admits himself to being surprised at the way in which it took a foreign ear to see the potential of the instrument in a theatrical context. In Finland, the jouhikko has never been used in such a way, being purely the province of a few traditional folk musicians.
Lindsay was so charmed that she has even bought her own instrument, as a personal 50th birthday present, and she says the jouhikko has caught the ear of other violinists in Toronto.
Christopher Nightingale, who has had a massive task in knitting together the music of two diferent composers and fusing it with the underscore by his own hand, was to be seen wandering at the post-show gala with a mixture of exhaustion and relief on his face.
He has no idea what tomorrow will bring.
"I really don't know. I'll probably just go in a corner and weep! Actually I just want to sit down and not to think of The Lord of the Rings for a while. It's going to be tough. It has been a labour of love, it really had to have been... people have done much more than normally has been required from them. We have done this for three years, and now it feels really empty."
The weeks ahead will give some idea of whether the Värttinä members will be spending the next few years shuttling around teaching their Karelian singing style - and perhaps even the jouhikko - not just in London but also in New York, Hamburg, Singapore...
I've certainly got nothing against that idea", laughs vocalist Mari Kaasinen.
The first-night reviews of the show were mixed, but if LOTR proves to be a smash hit it certainly would not be the first time that the public has defied the critics: the concept of a "criticproof production" is the stuff of theatre legend, and the Princess of Wales Theater reported that box-office business was booming in the days after the première. Current plans call for a London opening in 2007.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 25.3.2006
Previously in HS International Edition:
Finnish-fuelled Lord of the Rings is magnificent stage spectacle (24.3.2006)
Links:
The Lord of the Rings (stage version)
Värttinä
PIRKKO KOTIRINTA / Helsingin Sanomat
pirkko.kotirinta@hs.fi
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Finger of fate pointed Lord of the Rings music towards Finland
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