Biography
Värttinä stands among the most globally prominent groups to arise from Finland’s modern music landscape, infusing the country’s folk heritage with a fierce, forward-looking approach that rejected both ancestral attire and the longstanding expectation of unaccompanied female singing. Emerging from the folk music curriculum at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, the ensemble took shape in the early 1980s with twenty-one founding participants, each previously linked to a local youth organization. Membership steadily contracted until, by the early 1990s, the core featured vocalists Sari Kaasinen, Mari Kaasinen, Kirsi Kahkonen, and Sirpa Reiman supported by a constantly shifting roster of instrumentalists.
Beginning with the 1991 album Oi Dai, their recordings rekindled the distinctive polyphonic traditions of the Finno-Ugric communities in Karelia, the eastern Finnish region that extends into Russia; Seleniko, issued in 1992, secured the band’s inaugural American tour. Subsequent releases Aitara in 1995 and Kokko the following year propelled Värttinä to widespread European fame, while repeated festival appearances throughout the continent helped maintain their visibility. In 1997 Vihma appeared on Wicklow Records, the imprint headed by Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains, and climbed to prominent positions on the CMJ charts; one year later the group issued the slower-tempo seasonal collection Can We Have Christmas Now?
Wicklow’s collapse at the turn of the century left the 2000 album Ilmatar without an American outlet until the Nordic specialist label Northside brought it to U.S. audiences in 2001. Although still deeply rooted in tradition, the record advanced the ensemble’s interest in newly composed material and electronic textures. The acclaimed Live in Helsinki arrived the next year. March 2003 marked the group’s twentieth anniversary with the lucid and personal album Iki, and in 2006 Miero surfaced on Peter Gabriel’s Real World imprint.
Beginning with the 1991 album Oi Dai, their recordings rekindled the distinctive polyphonic traditions of the Finno-Ugric communities in Karelia, the eastern Finnish region that extends into Russia; Seleniko, issued in 1992, secured the band’s inaugural American tour. Subsequent releases Aitara in 1995 and Kokko the following year propelled Värttinä to widespread European fame, while repeated festival appearances throughout the continent helped maintain their visibility. In 1997 Vihma appeared on Wicklow Records, the imprint headed by Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains, and climbed to prominent positions on the CMJ charts; one year later the group issued the slower-tempo seasonal collection Can We Have Christmas Now?
Wicklow’s collapse at the turn of the century left the 2000 album Ilmatar without an American outlet until the Nordic specialist label Northside brought it to U.S. audiences in 2001. Although still deeply rooted in tradition, the record advanced the ensemble’s interest in newly composed material and electronic textures. The acclaimed Live in Helsinki arrived the next year. March 2003 marked the group’s twentieth anniversary with the lucid and personal album Iki, and in 2006 Miero surfaced on Peter Gabriel’s Real World imprint.
Albums
Singles
