Martti Talvela: the Artist's soul

My meeting with "the Finnish Chaliapine".
To the singer's 75-th birthday.

The book is devoted to opera singer Vladimir Chernov.

 

	Title	Martti Talvela: the Artist's soul My meeting with "the Finnish Chaliapine"
	Author	Nickolay Gorbunov
	ISBN	978-5-838901-62-9
	Publisher	Kruk
	City	Moscow
	Year	2010
	Pages	408
	Copies	500

Nikolay Gorbunov's book "Martti Talvela: the Artist's soul" is the first one about this Finnish singer that is written by a foreign author and published outside Finland, in Russia. The author used to work in Finland as a Russian journalist for a number of years and he had the opportunity to contact closely with the artist, his family and intimately so, at their house, during the concerts. The author tended to uncover the sources of the singer's enormous talent, find them in his soul and his spiritual world. The book was published to commemorate the 75-th anniversary since Martti Talvela's birth (February 4, 1935).

The book consists of three parts. The first one is about the author's personal meetings with Martti Talvela. The second one is devoted to Russian and Finnish celebrities' memories of Martti Talvela shared with the author. The third one is the annex consisting the author's articles on Martti Talvela published in Russia. There are a lot of photoes in the book made by the author himself.

Nikolay Gorbunov has been researching the life and creative work of the great Russian singer Feodor Chaliapine for many years. He wrote the following books - "Feodor Chaliapine in Japan and China" (Moscow, 2002) and "Following the Scandinavian path of Chaliapine" (Moscow. 2008). Therefore is was quite natural that he paid attention to Martti Talvela who was broadly known as "the Finnish Chaliapine".

The singer's repertoir was rich and colourful. Martti Talvela sang bass parties in a number of operas by Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, Smetana, Kokkonen. But there was a special composer who played an outstanding role for the singer - the Russian Modest Mussorgski, author of the operas "Boris Godunov" and "Khovanshchina" which made Martti Talvela a worldwide celebrity. To explore the depths of them the artist was interested in studying Russian composers, writers and painters. Talvela played the role of Boris Godunov over 250 times and every performance was on the verge of emotions and spiritual upraisal.

The role of the artist is huge in founding and developing the Savonlinna Opera Festival which was headed by Martti Talvela from 1972 until 1979. As a result the Festival reached a high international level.

The book was published with the support of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

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