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Written in fRoots issue 190, 1999
 

LOITUMA
Kuutamolla
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 56 (1998)

Anita Lehtola is a member of both Loituma and Hedningarna, but there any similarity between the bands’ musical approaches ends.
      The opening track of Loituma’s second album Kuutamolla is a foxtrot, pretty but in an Andrews Sisters-go-Tyrol cutesy sort of way. Push on, though, and a distinctive atmosphere emerges: pleasant company in a bright, peaceful Finnish drawing-room, dust-motes twisting in the low rays of afternoon sunlight, with the possibility of quiet dancing, of minuet, waltz and elegantly-poised slow polska.
      Timo Väänänen is one of Finland’s leading kantele virtuosi, and he and fellow Loituma kantele player Sari Kauranen are regular collaborators with the leader in modern progressive kantele composition, Martti Pokela. In Loituma their resonant, silvery kanteles and the rich tone of violin and viola-player Hanni-Mari Turunen take on the role of accompaniment, chord-structured and keyboard-like, to the three harmonising voices of Lehtola, Kauranen and Turunen, in neatly-arranged songs largely in the popular music styles of an earlier era of the twentieth century. One of the two kantele instrumentals, Mikaelin Kirkonkellot is Väänänen’s contribution to the body of kantele tunes inspired by church-bells, its slow chiming under shifting arpeggiation a reminder of the communality between the old kantele way of making music and modernist systems music.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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