Portfolio
September 13, 2026SINI VAHERVUO
SELECTED ARTISTIC WORK
I am a Finnish recorder and historical flute player, artistic programmer and music educator specialising in Renaissance and Baroque music.
My artistic practice grows from historical instruments and the repertoire surrounding them, particularly Renaissance and Baroque recorders and Renaissance and Baroque transverse flutes. I am interested in instruments as sources of artistic knowledge: how their construction, tuning, articulation and sound interact with other instruments, voices and acoustic spaces.
Alongside performing, I conceive and develop concert programmes that connect historical repertoire with literature, cultural history and contemporary perspectives. My work extends from Renaissance consort playing and historically informed performance to contemporary music, interdisciplinary projects, artistic programming, research and writing.
Petrarch ❤ Laura 1327–2027
Current project · concept · artistic programming · historical flutes
In 2027, 700 years will have passed since Francesco Petrarch recorded first seeing Laura in Avignon on 6 April 1327. I conceived The Muse of Muses – Petrarch ❤ Laura 1327–2027 for Aurore – Helsinki Renaissance Music Festival to mark this extraordinary anniversary.
The programme follows the musical afterlife of Petrarch’s poetry across seven centuries, from Renaissance settings by composers including Guillaume Du Fay, Maddalena Casulana, Nicola Vicentino and Luca Marenzio to Franz Liszt, Erik Bergman and Kaija Saariaho.
At its centre is Laura: Petrarch’s beloved and muse, but also a figure repeatedly reconstructed through poetry, music and cultural memory. Seven centuries later, the project asks how we perceive her not only as the object of Petrarch’s gaze and the catalyst for an extraordinary body of art, but as a person whose image has acquired a cultural life extending far beyond her own.
The concert will be performed by Ensemble Nylandia at Paavalinkirkko in Helsinki on 31 January 2027 as part of Aurore – Helsinki Renaissance Music Festival. I am responsible for the concept and artistic programming and perform on historical flutes. The project is developed in close collaboration with conductor and harpsichordist Matias Häkkinen — my dear husband and my muse for almost twenty years.
THE MUSE OF MUSES
HISTORICAL INSTRUMENTS & CONSORT PRACTICE
Renaissance recorders are at the centre of my artistic practice. I am one of a relatively small number of professional musicians in Finland specialising in Renaissance recorder consort playing, alongside Renaissance and Baroque transverse flutes and Baroque and modern recorders.
Rather than treating the recorder as a single instrument, my work involves families of instruments of different sizes, ranges and constructions. Renaissance consort playing depends on the relationships between these instruments: tuning, articulation, balance and blend are created collectively. The physical placement of musicians and the acoustics of the space are therefore an integral part of the musical process.
I perform on recorders, Renaissance traversos and Baroque traverso as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player. My work with Renaissance consorts has included Ensemble Nylandia, recorder ensemble Q Consort and Renaissance traverso ensemble Intrā Vīrēs. I also perform with the Finnish Baroque Orchestra and other Finnish early-music ensembles and productions.
ARTISTIC PROGRAMMING
Aurore – Helsinki Renaissance Music Festival
Aurore has been part of my artistic work since the festival was founded in 2014. I have performed at the festival since its first edition, particularly as a specialist in Renaissance recorders and recorder consort playing.
Over the years, my role has expanded from performer to artistic programmer. My own concert projects at Aurore date back to 2017, and since 2020 I have been a member of the festival’s artistic programming team.
My programmes often begin with a historical question, text, instrument or overlooked repertoire. Research does not simply provide background information for the performance: it can change the questions being asked and ultimately determine the repertoire, musicians, instruments and structure of the concert itself.
2017 · In Her Majesty’s Service – Music from the Court of Elizabeth I
Programme concept · programme text · recorders
A programme with Ensemble Nylandia’s recorder consort Q Consort, soprano Tuuli Lindeberg and harpsichordist Matias Häkkinen exploring the musical world of Elizabethan England and its courtly culture.
2020–2022 · Renaissance Learned Women / The City of Ladies
Concept · artistic programming · research · programme texts · recorders
A more extensive research strand began with a seemingly simple question: why do we hear so little music by women composers from the Renaissance?
I originally conceived Renaissance Learned Women – Caged Birds and Other Animals for Aurore in January 2020. The festival was cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the project was eventually presented in 2021.
Researching the repertoire made the original question increasingly complex. The survival of music is shaped not only by who was able to compose, but by access to education, social class, religious and courtly institutions, conventions of authorship and publication, and the choices of later publishers, historians and musicologists. Historical sources also leave us with uncertain attributions, pseudonyms and a vast amount of anonymous music.
Could Anonymous have been a woman?
Rather than imposing a modern division between men and women on the period, I became interested in the particular position of learned women who gained access to education through aristocratic birth, court culture or religious institutions. Their opportunities could be extraordinary in the context of their time, while remaining closely circumscribed by social structures.
2021 · Renaissance Learned Women – Caged Birds and Other Animals
I built the programme around music and texts connected with figures ranging from Hildegard of Bingen and Beatritz de Dia to Gracia Baptista, Eleonora d’Este, Maddalena Casulana, Isabella de’ Medici and Vittoria Aleotti, alongside poetry by women including Veronica Gambara and Vittoria Colonna.
Works by male composers, particularly music evoking birds, formed a commentary running through the programme.
Maddalena Casulana had not previously been performed at Aurore, and her music became an important part of my programming and research around the festival. She has since returned in my later programmes, including The City of Ladies in 2022 and In the Sweet Shade of the Forest in 2025.
Petrarch’s poetry, meanwhile, has been part of my repertoire throughout my career. One of the works in Renaissance Learned Women brought the two together: Casulana’s Ahi possanza d’amor, setting a text by Petrarch. Both are central again to The Muse of Muses – Petrarch ❤ Laura 1327–2027.
2022 · The City of Ladies
The City of Ladies continued the research begun in Renaissance Learned Women, expanding the enquiry from individual composers towards broader questions of authorship and historical visibility.
The project brought together music and texts by women from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including named historical figures as well as music whose authorship remains uncertain. Attribution, anonymity, pseudonyms, education, social status and conventions of publication all complicate modern attempts to reconstruct who was able to create — and whose work was able to leave a trace.
Together, these programmes became an important stage in my artistic practice: research was no longer simply background material for performing historical music, but one of the means through which the programme itself was created.
2025 · In the Sweet Shade of the Forest – The Sound of Nature in Italian Madrigals
Concept · artistic programming · Renaissance traverso
A project with Renaissance traverso consort Intrā Vīrēs and UK-based Duo Accenti, exploring landscapes and images of nature through voices, Renaissance flutes and viola da gamba.
The programme returned to Italian madrigal repertoire, including Maddalena Casulana, while approaching images of forests, birds and the natural world through the particular sound world of Renaissance voices and instruments.
2027 · The Muse of Muses – Petrarch ❤ Laura 1327–2027
My current project follows the musical afterlife of Petrarch’s poetry across seven centuries while reconsidering Laura as muse, literary construction and possible historical person.
For me, artistic programming is part of musical practice: research, repertoire, instruments, musicians, texts and acoustic space ultimately meet in sound, when we experience this together with the audience.
AVE VIRGO, AVE VOS
Recorders · contemporary music · interdisciplinary performance
Ave virgo, ave vos brought music composed for the Virgin Mary into dialogue with contemporary performance and feminist neo-burlesque.
The project approached the Virgin Mary simultaneously as a religious figure, an artistic subject and a culturally constructed image of womanhood. Historical sacred repertoire was placed alongside contemporary bodies, perspectives and newly composed music.
As part of the project, I premiered Itzam Zapata’s Salve Regina for two voices, recorders, viola da gamba and theorbo.
Ave virgo, ave vos became a catalyst for looking more critically at how we treat historical material in the present. It strengthened my desire to dig deeper than popular historical narratives — into sources, contexts and contradictions — and to let that complexity inform my artistic work.
NEW & CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Alongside early music, contemporary music forms a continuing strand of my work. I have premiered works by composers including Gustav Nyström (Sju Ritualer, Intimacy), Itzam Zapata, Eero Hämeenniemi and Kirmo Lintinen.
For me, working with living composers has a close relationship with historically informed performance. In both, notation is only part of the process: the sounding result develops through experimentation with instruments, articulation, gesture, acoustics and collaboration.
My current work includes a new sound-installation project in which I perform as an instrumentalist and with my 10-year old alter ego Aallotar, with performances planned in Norway in summer 2027.
Aallotar (Tuusulan Taiteiden Yö 2016, Photographer: Kari Kohvakka)
KAUNEIMMAT BAROKKIJOULULAULUT
Concert concept · 2012– · publication · recording
Kauneimmat barokkijoululaulut began as a concert concept in 2012, exploring familiar European Christmas melodies with roots in Baroque and earlier music through historical instruments.
Over more than a decade, the project has developed through concerts, arrangements and research into publications and a recording, as well as performances in different chamber and orchestral formats.
In 2020 Aviador published Kauneimmat barokkijoululaulut ukulelelle & nokkahuilulle, with arrangements by Sini Vahervuo, Jarmo Julkunen and Matias Häkkinen.
In 2024 Ensemble Nylandia released the album Kauneimmat barokkijoululaulut on Alba Records (ABCD 534). On the recording I play traverso and soprano, alto and tenor recorders.
The project traces the long life of an artistic idea: from a concert concept into arrangements, publications, recordings and encounters with new audiences.
2016 Kauneimmat barokkijoululaulut