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March 8, 2010
Rajaton showed extraordinary skill in ABBA concert
Chronicle Herald (Canada):
The excitement started when Symphony Nova Scotia, led by Bernard Gueller, played a full and symphonically righteous ABBA medley at the top of the Pops Series concert in the Cohn on Friday night.
The magic started when Rajaton, three 30-something women and three ditto men from Helsinki, Finland, strode across the front of the stage, spaced like the Beatles crossing Abbey Road.
The feeling of deep happiness that instantly came from who knows where — though the medley probably had something to do with it — stayed in the house for two hours while these six virtuosic singer-musicians and the symphony, enhanced by a baker’s dozen of extra players, gave their all for ABBA.
With Rajaton in the house, the sweetness of their voices, the honeyed quality of the women’s voices, the gentle warmth of the men’s and the extraordinary level of musical skill they have developed over the last decade as an a cappella group whose only peers are The Nylons and The King’s Singers. It extends to inventing shockingly realistic imitations of instruments, ranging from snare drums to bells to whining wah-wah trumpets and trombones, as in their extraordinary performance of Fernando.
They brought the house down with that one on Friday night. Even the symphony musicians were impressed. Rajaton’s own arrangements are astonishing in their inventiveness and their sheer musical genius. All the elements of first-rate musical craftsmanship are present in the layering of inner voices, the rhythmic interchanges and the seamless exchange of colours.
Bass Jussi Chydenius sounds like a double-bass or creates an entire drum corps, realistically snapping out a snare drum rhythm and rolling it off into silence. Cymbals splash from everywhere in the group as needed but all these effects, marvellously, reach a pared-down level of subtlety which is neither under- nor over-done. The tiniest vocal inflection is inserted precisely in place, not studied, but spontaneous.
And though all these singers are strikingly fine, an extra word needs to be said of Soila Sariola’s Streisand-esque soaring over the top of the tune in The Winner Takes All and of Hannu Lepola’s Jaggeresque skipping across the stage, doing lead-singer gyrations with a fine mixture of comic irony and metaphoric precision. Read more.
Posted by acapnews at March 8, 2010 9:09 PM
