Kampin Laulu Chamber Choir
is a youthful chamber choir located in Helsinki. The core competence of the choir is more or less contemporary Finnish choir music but the repertoire has extended during the years from renaissance and baroque music all the way to jazz and rock.Kampin Laulu was established in 1990, when Timo Lehtovaara needed an instrument for his choir conducting exam at the Sibelius Academy. The devotion to sing together did not die out after the exam, but the choir decided to carry on the good work even further.
Lehtovaara conducted the choir as long as until 2005. Having moved from Helsinki to Turku, he decided to leave the post as the artistic director and was replaced by Eric-Olof Söderström.
The number of singers in the choir varies slightly but has in the recent years been around 30. At the moment about one third of the singers are music professionals, the rest are active amateurs.
The choir gives annually three to six concerts of its own - mainly in the Helsinki area, but occasionally also elsewhere in Finland. Additionally there are a number of other performances as well as recordings.
Kampin Laulu has co-operated with e.g. Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Jyväskylä Sinfonia, UMO Jazz Orchestra and several smaller ensembles and bands. The choir has also given birth to a charming male ensemble called Kampin Kukot.
The choir received its first competition award at the Klemetti chamber choir contest in 1996. At the Tampere Choir Festival, the choir received golden marks in 1993, 1995 and 1997. In the triumphant year 1997, Kampin Laulu also won the first prize at the Cork International Choir Festival. In Bela Bartok competition in Debrecen, Hungary in 2002 the choir won in the chamber choir category and in addition the Grand Prix of Europe, which led to a invitation to Tours France in 2003 to compete for the European Grand Prix for Choral Singing. In the same year, the choir was awarded as third in the first Harald Andersén competition. The community spirit of the choir has been lifted up in festival tours from Visby to Taiwan and from Germany to Sydney.
Now in its puberty, the choir still wants to maintain its open-minded, spontaneous and even anarchistic attitude to music.
