"Drops" is the group's third effort and it came out last year.
The Kanteleliitto ry (The Finnish Kantele Association) has awarded Vilma Timonen Quartet’s newest recording, Drops, as the Kantele Album of the year. This year, the winner was selected by Hannu Lintu, the Chief Conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He describes his choice as follows:
”This recording immediately opened a door to a fresh, interesting world – a world that, to me, seemed to reflect a peculiarly Finnish relationship with nature in an intriguing way. We often tend to think of something very concrete and external, such as lumbering in the forest, when we think of Finns and nature. This I find erroneous. Our relationship with nature is something that we all carry within us, and we can experience a strong connection to nature even if we lived in a metropolitan environment. This is what made Sibelius such an exceptional composer – the nuanced treatment of the relationship between man and nature. This recording bears a trace of a similar philosophy: at one moment the music is pulsating with urban beat, at another the listener is taken somewhere completely different. Different worlds are combined in an interesting way. The level of musicianship is very high and the vocalist’s voice captures the listener's attention at once.”
Drops is mainly comprised of Timonen’s original compositions that have reached their final form in the hands of the whole quartet. Vilma Timonen plays the kantele and sings, while the rest of the crew is composed of Topi Korhonen (guitar, trumpet, mandoline, vocals), Jaakko Kämäräinen (bass and vocals) and Tuomas Timonen (percussion and vocals).
Read more (in Finnish only):
American World Music Central has chosen VTQ’s album among the Best World Music Albums of 2015:
www.worldmusiccentral.org/2016/01/03/best-world-music-albums-of-2015