“Lauda, lauda, laude,” sings the Celebrant, a.k.a. baritone Ville Rusanen, against an escalating orchestral and choral accompaniment. Lauda is a Latin word that means “praise”. We are at a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s magnum opus, MASS, at Ouluhalli. I am in Oulu, one of this year’s European Capitals of Culture, to find out what their catchphrase “cultural climate change” is all about.

My first impression was that cultural climate change means people trying out something new: going to see performances that seem unfamiliar. You know, culture belongs to everyone and many things can be culture, that sort of thing. And so I found myself going to see MASS, a new experience for me in several ways.

When I relocated from southern Finland to Oulu to study 19 years ago, my then spouse and myself browsed the brochure of the Oulu Sinfonia and mused whether we should go and listen to a symphony orchestra. We mainly listened to heavy metal at the time, and symphony orchestras are often used in metal music too.

Yet somehow 20 years passed, and I still had not heard a symphony orchestra live. The feeling was that we just weren’t the sort of people who go to symphony concerts. So we passed it up if there was something else going on. And there always was.

This year, in the spirit of Oulu being elevated to European Capital of Culture, I decided to shake up my cultural habits. I wanted to go see a symphony orchestra, of course. And when I heard about MASS, I was really excited: I could witness not just a symphony orchestra but other genres of culture quite unfamiliar to me, since the work is an amalgam of musical theatre, contemporary dance and ballet. There would be 250 people on stage. This was something I had to see!

A controversial work

MASS caused something of a scandal in its day. When it was performed at the grand opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, President Richard Nixon did not attend. The USA was fighting a war in Vietnam at the time, and because MASS was pro-peace and anti-war, it was felt that it would put Nixon in an embarrassing position.

Some people in the Catholic Church and in the public at large saw the work, being built on the structure of the Catholic Mass, as vulgar and outright blasphemous. Subsequently, however, the work has been performed at several distinguished venues worldwide, and the Catholic Church actually requested a production to be staged at the Vatican in 2000.

MASS is, as noted above, based on the Catholic Mass, and its movements are named after its liturgical parts. There is no plot as such, even though there is a narrative.

Furnished with this background information, I entered Ouluhalli. So did many others as well; there was a queue some 100 metres long at the entrance. The hall looked full, and I saw people I knew from various contexts entering the hall with me. It did not feel like entering a closed circle where I did not belong. I brought up the subtitling app on my phone so that I could follow the performance, which included portions in several other languages besides English.

A full-body experience

“All you big men of merit who ferret out flaws, you rely on our compliance with your science and your laws, find a freedom to demolish while you polish some award,” sang the Celebrant. The lyrics of the work seem to be about losing faith in society at large and in higher powers, and one inevitably draws parallels with today’s world. People may regard themselves as decent and honourable and yet wreak destruction in the name of the system or of justice.

I can feel the live singing of the ‘street choir’ and the Celebrant in my body. The rhythms shift. A long quiet passage builds up tension: what is coming next? The dancers, ‘acolytes’, move about dynamically in costumes coloured in pink, green and blue, illustrating the mind and emotions of the Celebrant, which become increasingly dark as the performance progresses.

As a journalist and photographer, I pay attention to the skilful use of lighting to create contrasts. The performance is projected on a screen behind the performers but in black and white. This at once heightens the sense of the divine and creates an impression of shadows in paradise. I find myself wondering whether it is a live image from the performance I am watching or a pre-recorded video. I have a fleeting recollection of Käärijä, Finland’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023, whose pre-recorded shadow was back-projected in enormous size in his performance in the final round. I reflect on whether it is appropriate to draw parallels between Käärijä and MASS, but perhaps in the spirit of cultural climate change it is permissible.

Boy soprano Vilho Pohjola appears on stage, glowing with divine radiance. He also sounds like it: his pure voice makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

The mood becomes intense and somehow surreal. Finally, the performance ends and the applause begins. It goes on. And on. I rise to my feet with the rest of the audience as the performers take bow after bow. I notice that the children’s choir includes the daughter of a family I know, who is in a music class at school. So Oulu2026 really does impact the lives of ordinary people.

As I clap, I note that I am feeling awesome, as if I had actually been to mass. Why do I not go to more music performances? When I return home, I suggest to my spouse that we should book tickets for a concert of the Oulu Sinfonia in the autumn.

I also discuss the experience with my friends. Some of them loved MASS, some were somehow expecting something more. One said that they had nearly fallen asleep. I find that it requires willpower to stand firm in my view if any of my friends disagrees with me.

Shared flow on stage and in the audience

So I implemented a personal climate change by attending a music event previously unfamiliar to me. How does a performer experience a cultural climate change? I invite myself to talk to Matias Nässi, who plays the horn with the Oulu Sinfonia.

When the MASS performances finished, Nässi began to practice Das Lied von Der Erde by Gustav Mahler. He plays a few notes from it as I meet him at the Oulu Music Centre. He understands exactly what I am talking about when I tell him that I had felt MASS in my body.

“People come to orchestral performances because you can not just hear but also feel the music,” says Nässi.

Nässi notes that many people feel self-conscious about going to a concert because they wonder whether they are able to experience the music ‘correctly’; whether they are able to discern all the finer points of classical music. But there is no correct or incorrect way to experience music. The main thing is to feel something.

“If you find yourself getting tired, that’s also a feeling. It means you’re really relaxed.”

He describes MASS as a huge combined effort by multiple parties in Oulu.

“It involved the Oulu Sinfonia, the JoJo Oulu Dance Centre, freelance musicians, dance education students from the Oulu University of Applied Sciences, the Lapland Military Band from Rovaniemi, opera singers, musical theatre singers, a boy soprano and what have you. It felt like we had the opportunity to present some of the best that a year as Cultural Capital can offer.”

Nässi’s role as a horn player was that of a cog in a huge machine. His individual part was not huge, but something would be missing if he wasn’t there. Everyone doing their part to contribute to the whole is the very essence of playing in an orchestra and also what makes a grand work such as MASS so great.

“I’ve never been a competitive person. In an orchestra, there is no competition; everyone works towards the same goal. There’s an incredible feeling of community,” says Nässi.

The best moments in an orchestra are those where the conductor and the orchestra focus as one. Time and place dissolve into a shared flow state. This happened during MASS.

Nässi rarely plays in performances where there are stage performers too. He would have liked to see the production from the audience as well.

Culture is for everyone

Nässi understands ‘cultural climate change’ to mean that culture is not an elitist pursuit but something that is for everyone.

“Culture can bring people together in a polarised world,” says Nässi.

So far, Oulu2026 has managed to blow his mind with the Sámi opera Ovllá. He managed to see it even though he was in the orchestra, because not all musicians were needed for every performance.

There is a substantial Sámi minority population in Oulu, but Nässi, having moved to Oulu from Tampere, did not know very much about Sámi culture.

“One of the purpose of cultural events is to convey information about other cultures. I certainly had my horizons broadened. I hope that a lot of other people shared my experience.”

Cooperation is the key for cultural climate change

Henri Turunen, programme manager of the Oulu2026 Cultural Capital Year at the Oulu Cultural Foundation, affirms that ‘cultural climate change’ can have multiple meanings. Its core is the notion that everyone should see culture as part of our everyday lives and a means for bringing people together.

Another aspect is getting cultural practitioners in Oulu to go outside their respective bubbles. Theatre, contemporary dance and the symphony orchestra are normally separated from each other, but in MASS they worked together.

Turunen also points to the production of the opera Carmen coming in the autumn; it will combine flamenco, the Huutajat male choir [who shout rather than sing] and the symphony orchestra.

The programme for the year generally seeks to combine forces in new ways: arts organisations have been collaborating, but there are also combinations of technology and art. People from elsewhere in Finland have been brought in, and there are international collaborations too.

“The idea was to take the good things that Oulu already has and join forces to show them to the world and also to invite other people to participate in those things. That’s what cultural climate change is,” says Turunen.

The Cultural Capital Year has offered creators and performers the time and money to do new things together. Yet this year is only the beginning of the cultural climate change.

“Building new collaborations is always slow as we learn what works best. All this will become easier and more efficient as we go on. I believe that the legacy of the Cultural Capital Year will include templates for new kinds of cooperation and a wealth of contacts.”

I, for one, am already undergoing a cultural climatechange.

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The author is an Oulu-based journalist, photographer and non-fiction author. She has also written articles about the Oulu2026 Cultural Capital Year for the Oulu2026 magazine.

Translation Jaakko Mäntyjärvi.

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