Introducing Rockland

Pine Mountain Music Festival is making plans for the New World Premiere performances of its new opera Rockland, on July 15 and 17, 2011 at the Rozsa Center for Performing Arts on the campus of Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan.

The Old World Premiere will take place in Nivala, Finland, a few weeks earlier.

On January 27, we held a press conference about the new opera “Rockland,” which will be premiered in July 2011.  The press conference was held at the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts in Houghton, the same site where the upcoming premiere will be presented. 

 

This opera is based on a long-forgotten incident in Rockland, Ontonagon County, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in 1906, when a group of striking Finnish copper miners were confronted by sheriff’s deputies.  Shots were fired, and two Finnish miners were killed.

One of the miners, Alfred Laakso, wrote an account of the events, which his grandson, Andy Hill, read a few years ago and thought would make a good piece of musical theater.  He discussed this with John Kiltinen, who saw possibilities for an opera.

John Kiltinen pitched the idea to Pine Mountain Music Festival, whose board liked it.  In short order, John Kiltinen and his wife, Pauline, raised the money for the commissioning phase, partly from themselves and partly from Gloria Jackson, who has family roots in Nivala, Finland.

Jussi Tapola, a well-known stage director at Finnish National Opera, was hired as librettist, and Jukka Linkola, a renowned composer with several other operas and symphonic works to his credit, was given the job of composing the opera.  It was completed in mid-2009.

Currently the Nivala Festival (Jokilaaksojen Musiikkisäätiö) is making plans for the June 2011 production in Finland, and Pine Mountain Music Festival is doing the same for the July 2011 production in the United States.

 

The Logo

In the Rockland logo, the pick symbolizes the mining profession of the protagonists, and generally the frontier life in which so many of the early settlers, our ancestors, struggled to survive and make a better life for their descendants.

The white rose is to provide contrast to the pick, as the opera includes a love interest.  It also provides an interesting historical reference, as Alfred Laakso was a member of the White Rose Temperance Society in Rockland.

The thorns on the rose stem (the arm of the "R") symbolize that life could be hard, and difficulties could arise.

The Story Line

To help promote the opera, Pine Mountain Music Festival is working with community artist Mary Wright on a project called "The Story Line."  Schoolchildren and others in many communities in the Upper Peninsula are invited to write the story of an ancestor who worked hard and overcame adversity, like the people in the opera.  These one-page stories are then transferred to dishtowel-sized pieces of fabric and hung from "clotheslines" as a way of honoring our ancestors and making young people aware of the history on which their lives are built.  These displays will appear in various communities and ultimately around the Rozsa Center at the time of the opera’s premiere in July 2011.