“Guitar music here every evening!” announced a poster in Finnish at a Mallorca hotel popular with package-tour holiday makers in 1973. With the launch of mass tourism in the mid-60s, Spain was the first foreign culture experienced by many Finns beyond their neighbouring countries – and music was part of its appeal.
While the tango has been popular in Finland for more than a century, flamenco is a comparatively recent favourite. In both cases, Finnish musicians have taken Latin rhythms that at first sounded exotic and re-envisioned them, tapping into the southern fieriness and perhaps recognising familiar melancholy.
Over the past half-century, Spain has become home to one of the largest populations of expatriate Finns. These include musicians such as guitarist Raúl Mannola, a rare foreigner embraced by the country's closely-guarded flamenco establishment.
A professional jazz guitarist before moving to Spain in 1986, Mannola became the first non-Spanish finalist at the Córdoba flamenco competition and winner of the Murcia flamenco competition. After a stint back in inland, he earned a flamenco degree from the Córdoba Conservatory in 2007, then spent a decade as a teacher at Madrid’s Arturo Soria Conservatory and an accompanist at the Real Conservatorio Profesional de Danza Mariemma.
Mannola now tours the world with the duo Flamencodanza with Finnish dancer Aylin Bayaz and has recorded 15 albums with various line-ups. Three are with his fusion band Aurora Clara, which weaves flamenco with electric jazz-rock and has featured violinist Jerry Goodman of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra.
“On one hand, I’m a quite traditional flamenco guitarist with deep roots in accompanying flamenco singing, where the essence is, and on the other, I’m a fusion guitarist who has the freedom to play or mix whatever I feel like,” says Mannola. “The fusions work when they come out naturally, when the music is part of your identity.”
When he taught himself flamenco from LPs in the early ‘80s, “the main challenge at first was to sound authentic, without a foreign accent.” Having mastered that, was it tough to be accepted as a flamenco playerin Spain?
“If you’re good enough, it’s not a problem,” he says.“I always felt welcome and accepted.”
Connecting across continents
That was also the experience of another Finnish guitarist who has studied and played widely in Spain, Joonas Widenius. He has collaborated with singer Anna Murtola since around 2003, the duo recently releasing their ‘Nordic flamenco’ album Estrella del Norte (Arktik Traktor Records 2025).
“There’s still is a bit of a mystique around flamenco, and whether it’s even possible for a non-Spanish, non-Gitano to learn it,” notes Murtola. “But I’ve been lucky to mostly have encountered Spanish flamenco people who are just happy to see that the love of flamenco is international and that it connects people across continents.”
Dubbed ‘the world’s northernmost flamenco singer,’ Murtola writes some of her own material in Finnish, including spoken-word poetry interludes.
“As a non-Spanish artist, I try to find my own angle on flamenco in my original music. It’s important to have sufficient knowledge, understanding and respect for the tradition – but also to bring in something of my own. Only then does it make sense artistically.”
Widenius and Murtola hail from Tornio and Oulu in northern Finland – about as far in Europe as you can get from Andalucía. That’s where the murky roots of guitar-based flamenco took hold in the 18th century among Gitano (Romani) musicians and dancers, drawing on Arabic, North African, Sephardic and possibly South Asian influences, all dating back to before the Jews and Arabs were expelled from Spain in 1492.
Those sounds – especially the Sephardic music of Spanish Jews – are also constant inspiration for composer and multi-instrumentalist Roni Martin, whose credits include dozens of film and dance scores and albums. He is artistic director of the new Helsinki Flamenco Bienal (22-26 April 2025) along with choreographer and dancer Kaari Martin. The two have won many awards with their ensemble, Compañía Kaari & Roni Martin.
“My family background is Jewish, and some of my earliest memories are hearing old Jewish songs at my grandmother’s place,” says Roni Martin. “Jewish, Arabic and Romani music are all deep in the foundations of flamenco. Studying the Sephardic musical tradition has been extremely rewarding to me and made me look at flamenco in a very different way. But I happily combine flamenco, free jazz, klezmer, the Beatles and atonal music. In music, there are no boundaries, just a mountain of history to learn from.”
“Sweaty women stomping the floor”
Kaari and Roni Martin began working together in 2003, starting with a flamenco version of Finnish epic, the Kalevala.
As Roni Martin recalls, “flamenco was very popular in Finland in the 90’s and early 2000’s, mostly because, incredibly, one of Europe’s biggest flamenco festivals happened to be in Tampere. All the biggest names performed there, which inspired a generation of Finns that were lucky enough to experience it.”
Going back further, says Widenius, “there have been various waves of flamenco in Finland, starting in the ‘60s when people started going to Spain on holidays. The first flamenco association in Finland was formed in Oulu around 1990. In the ‘90s, it was quite popular in Tampere, Helsinki and Oulu, where there were dance classes every day,” he says.
Among those avid early dancers was Murtola’s mother. Seeing her dance made a big impression on young Anna.
“I remember watching these very focused, sweaty women stomping the floor and thinking that there was something powerful here! In the ‘90’s there was a big wave of flamenco enthusiasm in Finland, brought on by the films of Carlos Saura, including Blood Wedding,” says Murtola. As a young adult, she began dancing herself.
“At the dance classes, we mostly used recorded music. I remember thinking that I loved the sound of flamenco guitar but ‘why, oh why do those singers have to sound like they’re suffering all the time?’ I never thought I could sing flamenco myself someday.”
Soon, though, she learned about ‘the holy trinity of flamenco’ – singing, guitar and dancing through the local flamenco club.
“After realising I could sing these songs with my own voice, rather than having to sound like an old man from Jerez, I got highly motivated,” she remembers. Soon she was performing with guitarists such as Widenius and taking lessons from visiting Spanish singers, then studying in Granada.
“In 2015, I had the best luck of my life when I was accepted to the Nordic Master of Global Music (GLOMAS) programme between the Sibelius Academy and the Royal Academy of Music Aarhus in Denmark. It didn’t include flamenco at all but a lot of other musical traditions, instrumental and pedagogical studies, ethnomusicology and musicianship that have all helped form my work.”
Parallel darkness
Why then are some Finns drawn to Spanish music? Are there any parallels between the two faraway countries’ musical traditions?
“Flamenco music has basically a dark mood, and I think that goes well with the Finnish character,” suggests Mannola. “Musically, I don’t see much in common.”
Murtola agrees, saying: “Any parallels would be in the mentality, rather than in actual musical similarities. Some of the most profound flamenco styles can be quite serious, even dark. This darkness I think resonates in us Finns in some way. It’s not uncommon to sing about themes like death or suffering and some of these darker styles also have a very melancholic ring to them.”
“I have for instance combined ancient Finnish lullaby lyrics about the death of a child with the melancholy flamenco equivalent, Nana, finding common ground in how to express sadness.”
“At the same time, flamenco has a lot of bursting energy and dynamics, everything between a whisper and full-on screaming. The most important thing is to express and convey feelings. This huge potential of expressiveness is something that doesn’t come naturally for many Finns, but flamenco gives you a channel to express feelings that otherwise would remain hidden.”
Widenius echoes her, saying that “flamenco can be kind of cathartic of your emotions as a listener and as a player”.
Martin, too, sees similarities on the emotional plane.
“You can easily draw parallels between Karelian folk singers and cante jondo,” says referring to “deep singing,” one of the oldest forms of flamenco, marked by intense, anguished emotion.
Murtola has seen – and used – such parallels.
“When we were starting to work on Estrella del Norte (“North Star”), I was reading the Kanteletar folk epic [a parallel volume to the Kalevala] and noticed very similar themes to some flamenco styles. I translated old Finnish texts and put them into a flamenco framework for the song “Piedras en el río”.
“Another fusion of our Finnish roots and flamenco is “Nacimiento del Hierro”. It’s based on an ancient Finnish epic poem Raudansynty (“The Origin of Iron”) and the Martinete, a style of flamenco singing that was born in forges and blacksmiths’ shops, accompanied by the sound of a hammer against an anvil.”
Galloping at Koko
Appearing at Helsinki’s Koko Jazz Club in late February, Widenius almost looked like a heavy-metal blacksmith with his long black tunic, wide leather wristband and braided beard. Also dressed in blackwash his duo partner, Chilean multi-genre percussionist Ricardo Padilla, who has also played with Mannola and many Finnish pop, jazz and folk musicians.
Introducing a song, the guitarist reminisced about his early teenage years, when he was first starting to learn flamenco. In pre-Web northern Finland, it was very hard to find any instruction material.
“I still remember when I found my first falsetas and Bulerías compás in the British Classical Guitar magazine,” he recalled after the show. “I was like, damn! I finally really got something! I practiced that all summer.”
“My main challenge was the lack of material, but now I see that it was actually a good thing. I’m happy that YouTube and all that didn’t exist. Instead, whatever you did find, you played hundreds and hundreds of times. You were really focused on the material that you could get; it was like finding specks of gold. Nowadays there are a lot of people who want to play, but they just scroll through YouTube looking for material and don’t really concentrate on anything.”
In his later teens, Widenius studied flamenco and classical guitar while playing in heavy metal bands and trying to combine the three, with limited success.
The son of a blues guitarist and a musicologist, he was first bitten by the flamenco bug around age eight, when he got a copy of Friday Night in San Francisco, a 1981 guitar trio album featuring McLaughlin, Al Di Meola and flamenco legend Paco de Lucía.
“I totally fell in love with Paco’s style,” he recalls. “I was like, what the heck is that and who can play like that?”
At Koko, he often played much like de Lucía’s style, his left and right hands duetting in complex, juxtaposed patterns, sometimes with percussive thumps on the body of his guitar. Each piece built in a dramatic arc like a bullfight or duel with sabres.
Padilla added whistles and spoken encouragements, rang tiny bells and slapped his knees in tandem with Widenius’ dramatic right-hand movements, until they sounded like two horses galloping together across a plainin Spain.
Suspense, danger and freedom
That sense of flamboyance and drama is also at the heart of Compañía Kaari & Roni Martin (CKRM), which creates Finnish contemporary art inspired by the Andalucían tradition, has performed in 15 countries. In an unprecedented feat for a foreign group, CKRM’s The Raven won awards for best solo choreography, original score for dance, and costume design at the world’s premier flamenco choreography competition, Madrid’s Certamen Flamenco, in 2012.
Last year the ensemble staged a radically reimagined, sold-out version of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding at the Helsinki City Theatre.
“Our Blood Wedding didn’t have much to do with the original play; it was much more about Lorca as an avant-gardist and drawing parallels about current political situation in Europe and the rise of the fascism in the 1930’s. I used poems that Lorca wrote for his flamenco pieces in 1931 and re-wrote them musically, keeping some of the original melodies,” explains Martin. “Some scenes were improvised differently during each performance.”
At the Bienal, the company presents a major new work entitled ¡LORCA!, starring legendary flamenco singer Carmen Linares, 74, who won a Latin Grammy award in 2023, along with dancer Rafaela Carrasco, pianist Pablo Suárez, and Martin on electric guitar. The festival also showcases a work by dancer-choreographer Israel Galván, perhaps the most avant garde figure in contemporary flamenco.
“When flamenco is performed in the best surroundings by the best performers, there’s a level of suspense, danger and freedom rarely found in performing arts nowadays. That’s the experience we want people to witness,” says Martin.
More cross-genre collabs ahead
Beyond the new Helsinki festival, all of these artists have busy months ahead.
The Martins will tour with a piece called CKRM goes ROOTS featuring Spanish dancer Mariana Collado, Iraqi singer Ali Saad and Finnish jouhikko player Pekko Käppi. Roni Martin is scoring a series of short films by Emilia Annala, who is producing visuals for the Helsinki Flamenco Bienal and ¡LORCA!.
This year, Mannola plans to release his first “100% flamenco” album in 15 years and tour in Finland in between gigs with Aurora Clara and Flamencodanza.
Besides touring with Widenius, Murtola is beginning work on her third solo album and continuing with La Tierra Blanca, a solo show combining original music, video and sound art and dance, as well as the TRIÁLOGO project with electronic artist and percussionist Josu Mämmi, set in abandoned places such as silo designed by Alvar Aalto in Oulu.
Widenius, meanwhile, is composing music for a new work by choreographer Alpo Aaltokoski, which premieres in May in Helsinki. He’s also playing gigs with some Indian musicians, as well as with Murtola and solo, while working on his second book of flamenco lessons. He also composed one track for the latest album by Finnish rapper Paleface, alongside TV appearances. The Finnish homegrown strain of flamenco is clearly flourishing and finding new friends.
Featured photo: M.-L. Westfeld
