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Written in fRoots issue 306, 2008


MINNA RASKINEN
Siivet – Wings
Own label MINCD 001 (2008)

ARJA KASTINEN
Vaskikantele 1833
Ääniä AANIA-6 (2008)

Two Finnish kantele players focusing on the smaller, simpler forms of the instrument that were the norm before the development of larger box-kanteles and of the ‘concert kantele’ with its chromatic pitch-changing mechanism invented by Paul Salminen in the 1920s, and which have recently become popular among the new generation of players.

      Minna Raskinen’s last CD, Paljastuksia, featured her concert kantele, but thirteen years later for Siivet she’s moved to the much smaller five and fifteen stringed instruments. The five-string is the oldest traditional form, as created and played in Kalevala legend by Väinämöinen, its strings covering the five-note major or minor scale of most Finnish runo-song. One of her five-strings is strung with twisted carbon-fibre that mimics horsehair to give a softer, shorter-decaying sound than today’s usual steel strings. The version of 15-string she uses is one of the modern-technology instruments made by Hannu Koistinen that feature the sound-radiating wing extension of the soundboard that’s also found in some forms of Latvian kokles.
      Seckou Keita’s vocals and kora are a substantial presence on the album, contributing strong vocals and loping Senegalese rhythms as he weaves his fishing-nylon strings into the ring and patter of plucked and strummed kanteles. In Kankahankutoja / Weaver Anna-Kaisa Liedes sings traditional runosong lyrics to a Raskinen-composed tune, with Jukka Tolonen’s guitar splicing into the silvery shimmer underpinned by Heikki Virtanen’s double bass. The wide, multi-instrumentally muttering eleven-minute soundscape of Echoes of Valamo leads into the string-bending bass-droned Snow And Sand, before the closer’s musing on a pair of 5-strings and bowed piccolo 5-string that hints at Raskinen’s Japanese connections.

      Arja Kastinen specialises in the small kanteles, and there’s an uncompromising but attractive focus to her approach. For a start, most players put the instrument on a table or their lap to play; she puts it on the floor and hunches over it, semi-crosslegged. I remember, and treasure, her degree concert quite a few years ago in the chamber music hall of the Sibelius Academy. Her small figure squatting in the middle of the floor, the only movement the slow, random dancing round the walls of light reflected from a mirrored mobile she’d set up, and the flickering flame of a candle beside her. When the candle guttered and died, so her music ended. It was so hushed I couldn’t take off my jacket for fear of breaking the spell.
      Then she was playing a 15-string kantele, which she also used on her 1995 album Iro and which became the main subject of the acoustic-analysis research in her PhD. For Vaskikantele 1833 she plays a five-string, a copy of one from Karelia dated 1833. Vaski means ‘bronze’; the old kanteles were often strung with bronze wire, and this album is an exploration of its possibilities. Lower-tensioned than steel, bronze strings are deeper-pitched, with a dark, long sustaining sound. Kastinen brings out their diverse tone colours using various plucking, strumming, damping and harmonic techniques, making a whole album from just five strings tuned G, A, B or Bb, C, D.


© 2008 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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