Review: Kielletyt laulut

Songs come alive, does a person change

Dramatic singing evenings are one of the Helsinki City Theatre’s most beloved programme guidelines. As the series of song evenings is rarely supplemented, it is also constantly needed.


Forbidden Songs continues the path paved by Bellman, Brel and German cabaret songs. It has been compiled from Russian “songs of the underworld”, songs written in prison camps and folklore, or forbidden and often anonymously disseminated texts by well-known poets.


The poems collected by Pirkko Saisio have their own long history. The origins of many of them are unknown, nor what kind of different versions of them have been circulating. The songs and poems that Saisio has translated into Finnish largely together with Pirjo Honkasalo and Jukka Mallinen are a natural part of the living tradition.

The one-and-a-half-hour singing evening is given weight and impact above all by the fact that the performance also has its own history.

Saisio has been working with almost the same entity almost twenty years ago at Lilla Teatern. At the time, the show was called Mutsi, mä rakastan huijari.

The former title track has been re-translated by Saisio as Mutsi, mä digaan huijarii. The song of the composer and lyricist, whose origin is unknown, has been updated to the present day the most strongly of all the songs in the performance, and in that sense it could have given its name to the entire performance.

What is the truth about the war in Chechnya, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and the Putin youth?

The ensemble chosen by Saisio is enriched with all possible contradictions, and the performance becomes excitingly polyphonic, if only thanks to the multi-talented group of performers made up of different types of characters.


Jonna Järnefelt was involved already twenty years ago. Janne Marja-aho , who is better known as a dancer, is actually conquering a whole new territory as a singing actor.

Pirkko Saisio once again demonstrates her expressive precision, which is convincing both in the simplistic bare jealousy song and in the rehabilitation scene approaching the opera, which is based on a text by Daniil Harms .


Jussi Tuurna is responsible for the composition of Harms’s satire, the fresh arrangements of Forbidden Songs , and he also conducts the performance’s small orchestra.

All three musicians have a strong presence in the fast-paced action as strongly defined personalities.

Perhaps the greatest and most eloquent contradiction in Forbidden Songs is brought out by Jukka Mallinen in his introduction to the programme.

The intellectuals have begun to oppose songs that have become the manifestations of Russia’s new spirit. The language of the underworld is rooted in the public sphere, politics and business.