February 9, 2019 Musica Nova Helsinki

Helsinki Music Centre, Finland

Flash Flash is a crazy piece of work, not so much ‘about’ Andy Warhol as it is set around the idea of him. Juhani Nuorvala´s opera, if that’s what it really is, has a bit of a history, and it took scandalously long to make it to the stage in any form – now the world premiere will take place, at last, in February 2019. It’s written in just intonation, with a highly rhythmic musical score, and with a pitch perfect pop English text by Juha Siltanen, and makes heavy use of stage projections and lights. It could be defined as ‘populist high art’. It is manic and meditative, tasteless and touching, superficial and probing, all at once. Although rooted in pop idioms, one never loses the sense that it is all being guided by a highly-trained, intelligent hand, much like Warhol’s art. Above all, though, it is human, and grounded in a heartfelt emotion.

MAY 7-8-10-11 2019 Espoo City Theatre

Revontuli Hall

As Juha Siltanen says Flash Flash describes a person and a culture that are forced by their own history to flirt with destruction and death, substituting personal experience and self-knowledge with consuming people, time, sexuality. At its core lies a simple and coherent story of a lonely man surrounded by people but interwoven in it and surrounding it there is a portrait of American culture, placed, through the opera form, in one frame with European tradition. Thus, it is a double portrait picturing both an opera and its ‘hero’.

Executive Producer: MiklagårdArts

Concept, Direction of behalf of MiklagårdArts &

Curator of The Branded Self (Side-event): Ceyda Berk-Söderblom

Official partners: Musica nova Helsinki and the Espoo City Theatre, the University of the Arts Helsinki, and the Aalto University.