Värttinä at the Perelman Theater, Philadelphia PA, January 18 2007

It's been nearly twelve years since the album Aitara, by the Finnish band Värttinä, played over the speakers between the sets of a show at Central Park Summerstage I was attending. All sorts of ramifications have followed. Regrettably, their current tour of the United States includes no public shows in New York City, just a stop at the Finnish Embassy and a performance to be filmed for Link TV. The closest venue where I could see them perform, therefore, was the Perelman Theater inside the Kimmel Center in downtown Philadelphia, on a weeknight no less. That would mean leaving work in Manhattan at 4 to get to the show by 7:30, followed by a 10:30 Amtrak back to New York and another train out to Ronkonkoma, getting me home around 2 in the morning. Could it possibly be worth the aggravation and expense? In a word, yes.

The Perelman Theater is very nicely designed, both visually and acoustically. Whoever was responsible for publicizing the show really didn't reach the right audience, however, as the place was maybe a third full. A large number of seats in front of mine were empty, even though tickets for them had to have been sold. I'm guessing the theater sells season passes, but most of the shows there are classical, and the classical audience largely stayed home for this one. Oh well, there was more elbow room for the handful of die-hard fans who made up for their lack of numbers with their enthusiasm, and I had no difficulty abandoning my original seat in row L for one right up front.

Any description of a Värttinä performance has to start with the three women up front, singers Mari Kaasinen, Susan Aho, and Johanna Virtanen. The trio not only sing the songs, but generally act them out as well and do some sort of choreographed routine to each song. The sex appeal is obvious, but the singers succeed on many deeper levels than that too. Most of their singing style is rooted in the musical traditions of Karelia, the region in eastern Finland and northwest Russia which produced the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic poem. Their affinity for rapid-fire, highly alliterative singing in harmonies that generally emphasize seconds instead of the more conventional thirds and fifths started on the earliest Värttinä recordings and continues on their most recent release Miero, and was very evident in their performance last night. The women successfully convey the humor in much of their lyrics to the audience, despite the obvious language barrier. They are also not afraid to sing songs reflecting the dark, sinister side of Finnish folklore, and to make the vocals dissonant and ugly when a song calls for that. For this show at least, Susan Aho seemed to be the sparkplug for both the rest of the band and the audience, bringing a particularly infectious amount of energy and enthusiasm to he singing and movement across the stage. The band's six instrument players likewise are a potent force in their own right. Not only do they continue to effortlessly handle a variety of speeds, tempos, and rhythms, but they just keep getting tighter as a unit, and the sound they create just roars off the stage.

As usual, there were plenty of highlights. The show opened with "Itkin," the first song of Värttinä's 2000 CD Ilmatar. Dark and eerie, this song reflects the primal, folkloric influences in the band's sound. The combination of complex Balkan-inspired rhythms with urgent vocals shows up on every Värttinä album at least once, and "Tauti" (off 2003's iki) and "Lumotar" (off Miero) got the audience going early in the set. The joyous dance number Yötulet, my favorite of many stand-out tracks on Aitara, got the best live treatment from the band that I've heard to date. "Äijö," a song off Ilmatar about a hermit driven mad by a snake bite who casts a spell to purge the venom from his system, is very popular among the band's fans. While it impressed the producers of the theatrical version of The Lord Of The Rings so much that they hired Värttinä to compose some of the music for the play, "Äijö" is not for the squeamish, and I got the sense from the relatively tentative audience response that a few people didn't really know what to make of it. Personally, I thought Värttinä captured the demented frenzy of the song just right, especially Johanna Virtanen's insidious laughter during the spell-casting portion of the song. "Riena," another frantic and sometimes dissonant number, leads off Miero but closed the main part of the set. Complete with a blood-curdling shriek from Aho that blew away the intro on the recorded version, it proved that the newer material stands up well to the older material.

Given that I'd been to a concert in Manhattan on Wednesday night (I hope to get a review of that up soon) and had to make a series of train connections on my way to Philadelphia and back, I really had no time to get psyched up for this show. It had also been more than three years since I'd seen Värttinä, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. And yet, I wound up sitting up front with the same big childish grin on my face that I always get at their shows. Some things never change, I guess. I hadn't really forgotten that I consider Värttinä to be the best band currently gracing the planet, or why I feel that way, but the reminder was greatly appreciated.

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