Sinikka Langeland, Lars Anders Tomter, Kåre Nordstoga
Biography Sinikka Langeland, Lars Anders Tomter, Kåre Nordstoga
Sinikka Langeland
The way I use my voice has been influenced most strongly by Norwegian folk singing. Singing cow calls can actually be as challenging technically as singing an opera aria.”
Sinikka Langeland was born in Kirkenær in southeastern Norway in 1961, and studied piano, guitar and contemporary folksong. In 1981 she discovered the kantele (traditional 39-string dulcimer), which would become her main musical instrument along with the voice. She has said: “My Karelian mother told me about the instrument when I was a child, and one day we went to Finland to find one for me. I had not heard it before I got one. First I played just for fun, but after a while I felt a real sense of bonding with the instrument.” The sound-world conjured up by Langeland’s canteles seems to carry archaic echoes older than ‘folk’ tradition.
After studies in Paris and Olso, she became absorbed in a research project to sift through archives of old songs and music from Finnskogen and expand her “folk” repertoire to include rune songs, incantations, and old melodies from Finland and Karelia, as well as medieval ballads and religious songs. Langeland’s songs often focus on the relationship between people and nature.
She recorded her first solo CD in 1994, and made her ECM debut in 2007 with Starflowers:“There are jewels everywhere on this arresting example of ego-free music-making,” enthused the IrishTimes. She followed this up with Maria’s Song, in the company of two distinguished classical musicians – organist Kare Nordstoga and "giant of the Nordic viola" Lars Anders Tomter – interweaving folk melodies with the timeless strains of J S Bach. The Land that is Not is, like Starflowers, a quintet album, which in this case draws its inspirations from poets Edith Södergran (1892–1923) and Olav Håkonson Hauge (1908–94).
Langeland’s 2015 album,The Half-Finished Heaven, is a suite of songs largely based around “the mystery and joy of everyday encounters with animals in the forest”. John Kelman described it as “an album of touching melancholy, haunting beauty and oftentimes completely unexpected flights of improvisational fancy from a quartet of simpatico players”.
In 2010 Sinikka Langeland received the Rolf Gammleng Prize and in 2012 the Sibelius Prize.
