Kimmo Pohjonen: 60th Anniversary Concert and interview at the Helsinki Festival

Usually, the soloist is the last person to come on stage. Kimmo Pohjonen, however, came out first – wearing his trademark wrap-around skirt. He was followed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, percussionist Jusso Hannukainen and Estonian conductor Tõnu Kaljuste.

There’s no upbeat or clear start to the music. Pohjonen just starts breathing with his bellows, while the string orchestra plays improvised and uncoordinated phrases. It slowly gets louder, louder and louder until you think it really can’t get any louder. But the crescendo continues. And then it suddenly falls away, leaving you shocked and reeling. 

They performed Uniko, a piece originally composed by Pohjonen for the Kronos Quartet, which premiered 20 years ago to the day, also in the Huvila tent at the Helsinki Festival. It was a landmark work for both Pohjonen and the Kronos Quartet and has since been performed many times at world music festivals, jazz festivals and classical venues like Carnegie Hall.

Alongside the live performance, Pohjonen loops his accordion and there are also accordion, string and percussion samples worked into the composition. Due to its improvised sections, it’s a piece that is different every time it’s played. At the suggestion of Tõnu Kaljuste, it’s been expanded to this 18-piece string orchestra version which brings the string parts to the fore and reduces the impact of the electronics. 

The accordion rarely sounds like an accordion. It mainly has the role of a disruptive 18-kilogram noise machine and Pohjonen sings as well. He is mainly sitting, but occasionally stands and at one point seems to become possessed, moving agitatedly around on his platform before stepping down to centre stage and looking like he’s going to attack the conductor. Kaljuste fends him off. 

I ask him the following day what that was about. “I don’t actually remember what I was doing there yesterday,” he says. “In this improvised moment I have so many visions. And I think it’s great if the audience gets the feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen. Because nobody knows what’s going to happen in the world at the moment.”

Pohjonen tells me that in the rehearsal he’d told the orchestra that they were lucky to be able to do a concert where they were safe, “but let's try to at least give the feeling of what it is to be in a situation where you can’t escape.” At one of the more extreme moments two of the violinists spontaneously got up and stood waving their instruments in the air. “That’s never happened before,” says Pohjonen. “It was great.”

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Having been given an accordion at 10 by his father, Pohjonen started playing in a local folk club but was embarrassed by the instrument. 

“It was a very uncool instrument. This was the 1970s, it was the time of electric guitars and rock’n’roll. So nobody young wanted to play the accordion.” But he persisted, started playing classical accordion and in 1984 was in the second intake to the Folk Music Department of the Sibelius Academy. There, he started to experiment with electronics and create his own compositions.

I could spot numerous familiar faces from the Finnish folk music scene at Pohjonen’s 60th birthday concert – performers, venue directors and teachers. Among them was Heikki Laitinen, who created the course at the Folk Music Department. “I started with essentially just two ideas,” Laitinen said to me many years ago. “To perform the very oldest Finnish music in the most traditional way, and to be avant-garde and use the music in a new and crazy way – like Kimmo Pohjonen.”

While the first half of the concert was a new and intense version of a landmark piece – getting its Finnish premiere in this orchestral version – the second half was the premiere of a brand-new solo show. 

It started surprisingly conventionally, with a wistful accordion tune. And it turns out everything was created live on the accordion. No looping, no recordings, but a whole lot of electronics to manipulate the sound of the instrument and, for the first time, controlling visuals from the instrument. These, created by different collaborators, are a very powerful element – sometimes abstract, sometimes mystifying, but often vividly conveying a message. 

“I feel more and more that I can’t make music if I don’t comment on what is happening in the world, on all the things that bother me. It seems like wasting your life if you don’t try to speak more.” 

The melodic accordion opening doesn’t last for long, of course. Against an orangey image of a bare and smouldering forest, devoid of leaves, Pohjonen creates a whole sonic weather pattern. There’s thunder, wind, rattling windows, a pile driver, gunfire… a lot of it at a tumultuous volume. 

“A key element for me in this show is respect towards nature. Climate change is the biggest issue at the moment, so these elements are heavily in that music and in the visuals.”

Then there’s a sequence of images of various gods from faiths from all over the world. And similarly, the faces of various political figures, including the current president of Russia, flash past. 

“If climate change is not destroying us, wars between different religions are destroying us. There are so many men of our age – Putin, Xi, Lukashenko, Orbán, Bolsonaro. Those faces were going very fast, reacting to my keys. And these small Putins, they are destroying the world, using their power, using religion, using whatever and being like small boys in a sandbox. And we are not talking about climate change, we are talking about wars. War takes all the media attention, and all these things are destroying the world.” 

There are actual images of the war in Gaza on the screen, nothing too graphic, but images that give a nightmarish feeling of bombardment. Meanwhile, the music, with an Arabic flavour of sorts, sounds unusual in Pohjonen’s hands and seems defiantly nonchalant. “I wanted to give in that part somehow the feeling of the Middle East and actually, these days, I listen to quite a lot of Arabic music. So I wanted to go into this horrible situation that is in Gaza and try to imagine the people who are there.”

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Towards the end Pohjonen’s accordion starts to sound like one of those vast cinema organs. The images are travelling over craters on the Moon or Mars, and the music is cinematic. Suddenly we arrive at a pair of boots and the camera slowly pans up and there’s a monumental stone statue standing on the Moon. It’s a very arresting image. “For me this is a statue of stupid humankind who tries to find a solution for the future and thinks to settle on Mars or somewhere. The idea of going to Mars and putting energy and money into that is such a waste. The solution for me at the end is nature.” 

The music reaches a climax and suddenly there’s a super deep bass note that physically vibrates in your body. And I hear overtones of Strauss’ dramatic Also Sprach Zarathustra, the music to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appropriately enough also has humankind abandoned in space. When I ask Pohjonen about this, he says it wasn’t a conscious reference, but something that came spontaneously. “If, when we destroy this ball someday, with nuclear power, war or whatever, there will still be stone and mountains,” he says. “And someday there will be some green shoots and nature will stay. It’s a kind of happy ending.”

The response to this solo performance, which was over an hour long, was tumultuous. Pohjonen’s choice of an encore was to play a well-known polka on the accordion acoustically. After all the gizmos and electronics it was a useful reminder of what an amazing and versatile instrument the chromatic, five row accordion is. It was a refreshing and beautiful sound. The piece he played was the “Säkkijärvi Polka,” a well-known piece in Finland that Pohjonen frequently played in his early accordion days back in the village. 

There’s a story behind this as well. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise because Pohjonen has been playing it as an encore since February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. “I want to keep it in my concerts as long as the war is going on. Because when we got this attack last time from the east in 1939, in Karelia, it was just like now.” 

In one of the more surreal moments of the Winter War, Finland attempted to stop Russia from activating mines remotely over the radio by broadcasting a recording of Vili Vesterinen playing the “Säkkijärvi Polka” for three days! 

“It’s an important symbol against the war and for our culture,” says Pohjonen. “In Finland they are cutting money from culture. And even if you have a bigger enemy, they can’t kill you if you keep your culture.”

Pohjonen notes that this happened in Estonia with the Singing Revolution. They got their independence by singing. 

“Säkkijärvi is now in Russia and Vyborg is now in Russia, but the polka is here,” Pohjonen laughs. “And I will play it in every concert as long as this fucking war is going on in Ukraine.”

Featured photo: Minna Hatinen