Pekka Hako
MATTI AND TURKU
 "My father said I sang even before I could talk. On Saturdays, in the men's sauna, I would sit under the benches belting out all sorts of jingles."
Matti Salminen has been told that ditties and snatches of hits just welled out of him. He heard them in the yard and at home, where his mother would hum waltzes and tangos to herself. The family did not possess a radio.
The Salminen family first lived at Korppolaismäki, on Stålarminkatu. Theirs was a typical, humble working-class home - a sparse room measuring 24 square metres with a stove for heating and cooking and occupied by five people: father, mother, Matti, his sister and his maternal grandmother. His father was employed as a pile driver at the city ports and his mother worked at the Turku Brush Factory. They always had plenty to eat, though sometimes there was little more than bread and dripping.
In autumn 1951, when Matti was six, his mother took him to the workers' social club to audition for the children's choir. There he sang a children's song called The Little Sweep and was accepted as a regular member of the choir led by Aune Kuparinen. Over the next few years he would sing and act in the school's end-of-term concerts at Christmas and in the spring. His music teacher said he wished he could give him a singing grade of 14 out of 10.
Also singing in the choir were the Ruohonen brothers, with whom Matti went round the big Turku factories performing the Tiernapojat Christmas story. The part of King Herod was Matti's first real singing role. The boys earned themselves a little money with their efforts, but the best reward came at the Hellas chocolate factory.
"One particularly memorable experience was performing on the local pilot television. That was in 1957. Under a glaring TV light or two I performed in a little wooden shed of a studio while Mertsi Lehtonen accompanied me on the accordion. The piece I sang was the popular hit Maruzella."
Esa Pasa
In 1956 the Salminens moved into a brand-new two-roomed flat measuring a princely forty-or-so square metres on Tervahovinkatu.
Matti's formal education lasted eight years: six at primary school and two at vocational school. He had planned to do a third year learning carpentry and to apply for the school that would qualify him as a joinery foreman, but his mother died in 1960 and his father ordered him out to work. Thus Matti found himself as an apprentice building furniture for ships at the Wärtsilä shipyard in Turku.
A few years after Matti's mother died, his father married again, this time his wife's step-sister. In other words, Matti's step-mother was his mother's step-sister! The new family moved to a detached house of 60 square metres on Kupittaankatu.
"We led an ordinary working-class life. Though manual occupations were respected at home, I gradually came to realise when I was 16 or 17 that woodwork was not really for me. In addition to working long hours during the day, I would be out all over Southwest Finland until late at night singing hits and dance music under the name of Esa Pasa. The assumed name was dreamt up by my friends - for some reason I didn't want to appear under my own name."
The Tapio Koivunen Band had three saxophones, a vibraphone, trumpet and bass. What money they earned was shared out between them, but it did not amount to much per head.
Matti also got to know Jori Hellsten, who had a four-piece band of his own.
"Jori asked me to join them and we sang slightly jazzed-up music in four parts. We weren't short of gigs, because there were lots of places in the Turku region where you could go dancing. These dance gigs were my pin money, and they paid for me to take singing lessons, though sometimes the gigs were paid for in moonshine."
Looking back, the dances and village hall gigs were excellent preparation for opera. Which is all about acting and singing.
"I've never been afraid of the audience, and that's been a big asset in my work."
Opera calls
Being a keen performer, and with the help of Aune Kuparinen, Matti got involved with the opera association. The association was rehearsing Leevi Madetoja's The Ostrobothnians, and Matti was cast as Karjanmaan Köysti.
"This was the first time I realised just how music and drama click together. It was all new to me, and it set me thinking that classical music might be a serious alternative to being a joiner and a pop singer. Added to which, my job as a joiner was no longer challenging or even a craft really, having been rationalised and automated."
Aune Kuparinen convinced Matti that he really must give formal music lessons a try. She therefore introduced him to Heikki Teittinen, a celebrated figure in the field of music who had moved to Turku in the early 1960s. Teittinen provided him with records by Ezio Pinza, Nicolai Ghiaurov and Fyodor Chaliapin and even bought him a record player. He also taught him to listen to and learn from great voices.
After studying with Teittinen, Matti applied for the Turku Music College, where his voice teacher was Heimo Heimola, a choir leader from Paimio. In summer 1964 Heimola took Matti to the Savonlinna Music Days as a listen-only student.
"The following year we did some short opera scenes in a Savonlinna school hall and I sang the two Sarastro arias from The Magic Flute."
In 1962 Lea Piltti had been invited as head voice teacher at the newly-established Turku Music College. Matti changed teachers, and in addition to the standard solo songs Piltti began introducing him more seriously to the core bass arias. She also made his voice more flexible.
"Thanks to her, I began to realise that singing is not about producing as much sound as possible. Modest little folk songs, for example, revealed to me a wealth of nuance and detail - if you want to sing in a different way from the folk singers, that is."
In spring 1966 Lea Piltti asked Matti whether he would be interested in singing in the chorus of the Finnish National Opera.
"Of course I jumped at the idea of an audition. After all, I had nothing to lose."
Matti travelled to Helsinki for an audition in April 1966 and was to remain there for forty years.
Pekka Hako has written several music books. A book on Matti Salminen by him is due for publication in October.
Pekka Hako on kirjoittanut useita musiikkiteoksia. Lokakuussa häneltä ilmestyy kirja Pinnalla Matti Salminen.
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