Liisa Matveinen & Tellu Turkka: "Words Don't Stay Hidden!" 30th-anniversary tour 2026

The autumn season will kick off with Liisa Matveinen and Tellu Turkka on their 30th-anniversary tour "Ei sanat salaha jouva!"

Tickets €20/person

Master folk singer Liisa Matveinen and composer Tellu Turkka celebrate their long shared path.

It's time to bring forth the best parts, most touching stories, funniest anecdotes, and most powerful poems from their 30-year journey. Over these decades, Liisa and Tellu have researched and composed a vast amount of old poems from Mateli Kuivalatar and Iro Sissotar, among many other women rune singers. The verbal heritage of these women does not age. Liisa and Tellu not only compose their own music but also arrange old rune melodies. Accompanying instruments include kanteles, a Swedish moraharpa, wooden flutes, and an udu drum made of clay.

Their first joint publication was Tellu Turkka's rune song fairy tale for a women's quartet, Suden aika, from 1996.

The duo's first album, Mateli, was released in 1999. The compositions on the album are based on poems by Mateli Kuivalatar (1771–1846) from Ilomantsi. The collaboration continued in the Swedish-Finnish band Hedningarna and in the Suden aika quartet, which released the recordings Etsijä in 2004 and Unta in 2006. In 2011, the duo's second album, Vienan naisia, was released,

which contains texts by Viena Karelian women rune singers.

In 2023, IRO, a collection composed to the poems of Iro Sissotar, was released.
To celebrate their thirty-year joint career, the duo will organize an anniversary tour in 2026. Two singers from the Suden aika quartet, Katariina Airas and Karoliina Kantelinen, have been invited to the project.

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