Tarja Turunen

Tarja Soile Susanna Turunen-Cabuli (born 17 August 1977), known professionally as Tarja Turunen or simply Tarja, is a Finnish heavy metal singer, best known as the former lead vocalist of Nightwish.

Turunen studied lyrical singing at Sibelius Academy and Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe.

In 1993 she attended the Senior Secondary School of Art and Music in Savonlinna.

For several years Turunen performed various songs including soul music by Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin.

Later she listened to songs from the classical crossover singer Sarah Brightman, especially the song "The Phantom of the Opera", and decided to focus on that genre of music.

At eighteen, she moved to Kuopio to study at the Sibelius Academy.

She is a professional classical lied singer with a three-octave vocal range, and founded symphonic metal band Nightwish with Tuomas Holopainen and Emppu Vuorinen in 1996.

Their combination of hard and fast guitar riffs with Turunen's dramatic, "operatic" lead vocals quickly achieved critical and commercial popularity.

Their symphonic metal style, soon dubbed "opera metal", inspired many other metal bands and performers.

In December 1996, former classmate Tuomas Holopainen invited Turunen to join his new acoustic mood music project, and she immediately agreed.

At the recording session for the first demo Holopainen discovered that due to her classical singing lessons, Turunen's voice had become much more powerful than he recalled from their school days.

At the following band practices, Emppu Vuorinen used an electric guitar instead of an acoustic guitar because he felt that it gave a better accompaniment to her voice.

Holopainen later explained that the band members had gradually realised that Turunen's voice had become too dramatic for acoustic mood music and eventually came to the conclusion that the music had to be massive too.

Hence Holopainen decided to form Nightwish as a metal band.

Nightwish recorded a second demo with "more bombastic, dramatic" songs in September 1997.

Holopainen used this material to convince the Finnish label Spinefarm Records to publish the band's debut album, Angels Fall First.

Turunen was fired from the band on 21 October 2005 (just after the performance of the band's End of an Era concert) for personal reasons accompanied by an open letter from the band.

She started her solo career in 2006 with the release of a Christmas album called Henkäys ikuisuudesta.

In 2007, Turunen released My Winter Storm, an album featuring various styles including symphonic metal, and started the Storm World Tour.

She performed several concerts in Europe, playing in metal festivals including the Graspop Metal Meeting and the Wacken Open Air, before releasing her third album, What Lies Beneath, supported by a tour, which lasted until April 2012.

Her first live DVD Act I was filmed during this tour on 30 and 31 March 2012 in Argentina.

Act I was released in August 2012.

Turunen started the Colours in the Dark World Tour in October 2013 to promote her new album Colours in the Dark.

Her second live DVD was filmed during the events of Beauty and the Beat and was released in May.

In September 2015, Tarja Turunen released her first classical studio album, Ave Maria – En Plein Air.

In August 2016 she released The Shadow Self with a prequel EP The Brightest Void released on 3 June.

In 2018, she released the follow-up to her first live album, Act II.

Her latest album, In the Raw, was released on 30 August 2019.

Tarja Turunen was born in the small village of Puhos, near Kitee, Finland.

She has an older brother, Timo, and a younger brother, Toni.

Her mother Ritva Sisko Marjatta (Hakkarainen) worked in the town administration, and her father Teuvo Turunen is a carpenter.

Her talent for music was first noted when she sang the song "Enkeli taivaan" (the Finnish version of "From Heaven Above to Earth I Come") in the Kitee church hall at age three.

She joined the church choir and started taking vocal lessons.

At age six, she started playing piano.

At comprehensive school, Turunen performed as a singer for several projects.

Her first piano teacher Kirsti Nortia-Holopainen (Tuomas Holopainen's mother), "Tarja was in a school that had some very musical people. Even then she got to perform a lot. I think she sang in every school function there was."

Her music teacher, Plamen Dimov, later explained that, "If you gave Tarja just one note, she immediately got it. With the others, you'd have to practice three, four, five times".

At school she had a tough time, since some girls bullied her because they envied her voice.

To solve that problem, Dimov organized projects outside school.

At fifteen, Turunen had her first major appearance as a soloist at a church concert in front of a thousand listeners.