JUHA UUSITALO
The Dutchman, bass-baritone
 The world's great opera houses and festivals have, like the leading symphony orchestras, been fighting to engage the mighty bass-baritone Juha Uusitalo for productions even years ahead. Uusitalo originally studied the flute at the Sibelius Academy and worked as a flautist in various Finnish orchestras (the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra among them) and most recently the orchestra of the Finnish National Opera. As of the beginning of 2000 he has, however, been a solo singer at the National Opera. His career has been helped along by support from his native Finland: the scholarships of the Matti Salminen Foundation and the Finnish Wagner Society in 1999 and the Karita Mattila Prize in 2002.
Among the great leads in Juha Uusitalo's repertoire are Falstaff and Luna in Il Trovatore (Verdi), Escamillo in Carmen (Bizet), Gianni Schicchi, Jack Rance in La fanciulla del West and Scarpia in Tosca (Puccini), Leporello in Don Giovanni and Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte (Mozart), Mephistopheles in Faust (Gounod), Högman in The Last Temptations (Kokkonen), Donner, Gunther and Wotan in The Ring and the Dutchman in The Flying Dutchman (Wagner), Don Magnifico in La Cenerentola (Rossini) and Shaklovity in Khovanshchina (Mussorgsky).
Juha Uusitalo first sang the Dutchman at his Savonlinna Opera Festival debut in summer 2003. The following year he debuted in the same role at La Scala, Milan, San Francisco Opera and the Vienna State Opera, and he is down to sing it again at the Bavarian State Opera in 2006 and the Bayreuth Festival. Other forthcoming assignments in San Francisco and at the Bavarian State Opera include Pizarro in Fidelio (Beethoven) and Amfortas in Parsifal (Wagner). In 2007 he will be singing Wotan at the Vienna State Opera and making his debut at the New York Metropolitan as John the Baptist in Richard Strauss's Salome. At this year's Savonlinna Opera Festival he sang the part of Antti in Aulis Sallinen's The Horseman, a part sung at the opera's world premiere in 1975 by Matti Salminen. The opera continues in the Savonlinna Opera Festival repertoire for 2006.
His guest appearances have taken Juha Uusitalo to countless illustrious venues, as soloist with, for example, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and London Symphony Orchestras, and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in London. In autumn 2003 he sang at the Maggio Musicale festival in Florence and as soloist with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Juha Uusitalo played flute in the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra before he became a singer. He has sung as the soloist five times with our orchestra. He was Scarpia - with Päivi Nisula in Tosca in 2004 - and he will be the soloist at the "Dutchman's" Christmas concerts with the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra at the Concert Hall on December 16 this year.
| 
