By Tuomas A. Turunen

A festival concert in Southern Germany. A flight through Berlin to Helsinki. A rehearsal of two new wine compositions with the string trio. A TV interview and finally the first tasting-concert of the year. Considering that all this happened within 20 hours, I’m really happy that the timing worked without problems!

The day was busy before getting to ViiniExpo in Helsinki

Though I have to say that, in between, a few more hours of sleep would have been welcome. I played with Emil Brandqvist Trio on Friday evening at JazzArt Festival near Stuttgart , and because the tasting-concert took place at ViiniExpo in Helsinki on Saturday afternoon, I had to get up  at 3.30 am after two hours of sleep. The cab took me to the airport for the first possible flight to Berlin from where I continued my way to Helsinki. I was quite sure to have enough marginal to get on time to the concert that would start at 4:30 pm. But to be honest, I was pretty uncertain about the rehearsal at 1 o’clock and about my first ever TV interview just an hour later

Only my last flight was a little bit delayed, and I got to the rehearsal at Helsingin työväenopisto 30 minutes late. Which meant that we had 30 minutes to rehearse 15 minutes of music. And that was enough, thanks to Kaisa Kuvaja (violin), Tiinapriitta Savela (viola) and Sanna-Kaisa Ruoppa (cello) and their focused and effective work.

Cameras ready…

The TV crew came on time and we made 1 hour and half of filming and interviewing. No idea how it went, I’ll see that on Wednesday the 30th March (MTV3 in the morning if you’re in Finland)

Luckily Matthieu had been in Helsinki already since Thursday. He had been doing some preparative work at the concert place, so when the string trio and I came there 15 minutes before the tasting-concert, we didn’t have to panic. We put the stage in order, tuned the instruments and we were ready to let the people come in.

This was the first time we had the string trio with us, and also the projection of the photos was a new element. Everything seemed to work really well, and the ambience was relaxed but focused, despite of some surrounding noise from the other sections of the wine fair. We are especially happy that the Finnish media noticed our project with many articles before the event. I also made an interview after the concert, and once finished, I realised that I haven’t really been eating during the whole day. So it’s not a surprise that Matthieu and I finished the long day with a delicious dinner in the centre of Helsinki.

Tasting-concert at ViiniExpo 2016

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