“A peculiar, yet ever-so-wonderful mixture of absurd comedy and versatile virtuosity, gorgeously performed by Heikkilä and Kozlovski, Mytomato is a brilliant piece, dancing away on the borders of parody and multi-layered commentary – musical and extra-musical – all woven together with witty irony and creative craziness.”

Composer Jari Kallio’s critique of Mytomato 

Mytomato is a funny, weird, and multidisciplinary piece about tomatoes as emancipation.

Composer, librettist and director Miika Hyytiäinen writes:

It all started in Spring 2019 when Olga Heikkilä contacted me about a new vocal piece tailor-made for her. This task was inspiring since I already knew how technically and artistically free performer Heikkilä is. What material would allow the piece to speak further, be something bigger than one composer and one voice? It turned out that the solution was tomatoes…

Tomatoes started to pop up from every corner and always seemed to be a metaphor for emancipation, for making your own decisions and drawing the lines of your identity. In “Let’s Call The Whole Thing” the singers won’t give up their personal ways of communication. They are “tomayto” and “tomahto” people. In the Pomodoro method, people decided to take time for themselves by using a tomato-shaped timer. In Cantatrix sopranica L., writer Georges Perec creates a parody of academic writing and singers with text that analyses how the voice of the soprano changes when the laboratory personnel throws tomatoes at her. I decided to use Perec’s roles a bit differently: composers may throw scores like tomatoes and listen to what they get, but I see my role as a composer to take the hits and listen to them, finding some new ideas. The roles needed to change: in the 70’s and 80’s the tomatoes got the mind of their own in the film series “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”. In the 90’s emancipation was more poetic in the “Fried Green Tomatoes”. Covid-19 changed our relationship with tomatoes again: If you can’t control the world, at least you can grow an amazing tomato! 

Especially Olga Heikkilä’s skill to change between private Lied, lecturing researcher and larger-than-life opera style has been one of the inspiring factors. I have used my Voice Map method to understand her voice in detail, but I also wanted to get even more intimate: I asked her to make private recordings that demonstrate her voice just as she woke up. These recordings were made in d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence where we both were in 2019.

The score of the piece may be dowloaded here.

For the background video and further performance material, please contact the composer.

Performances

31.5.2023 in Musiikkitalo, Helsinki

3.8.2024 in Kallio-Kunikala, Järvenpää, part of Meidän festivaali.

(Heikkilä’s photo by Tom McKenz)