The brightest star of the symphonic rock scene, Tarja Turunen is Finland’s most internationally recognized voice and a pioneering figure in the fusion of rock and classical music. A soprano, composer and songwriter, she reached international fame as the co-founder, voice and image of the Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish for nine years, collecting Gold and Platinum Record Awards with the band in several countries.
The unique combination of metal music with Tarja’s soprano lead vocals helped define a new musical genre, quickly achieving critical and commercial success and inspiring a generation of metal bands and performers. But singing only somebody else’s creations was not her destiny, and her talent could fully bloom only outside that framework. Tarja had to walk alone.
Finally free to follow her own inspirations, heart and dreams, Tarja started her solo career, building a musical world of her own across both classical and metal music.
Since 2005, she has dedicated every December to bringing the magic of her Christmas shows to the world. The Christmas album Henkäys Ikuisuudesta achieved double Platinum status in Finland and was selected as the “Christmas Album of the Year” by local radio stations across the country. Tarja’s classical performances are not limited to Christmas shows, as she has performed chamber music concerts with orchestras and various line-ups in many countries throughout the years. She has also twice graced the famous opera stage of Olavinlinna Castle at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland, performing with Raimo Sirkia and José Cura. Another milestone in Tarja’s deep relationship with classical music came with the recording of her first classical studio album, Ave Maria – En Plein Air, at the Lakeuden Risti Church in Seinäjoki, Finland. Released internationally in 2015, the album was welcomed by enthusiastic reviews.
Tarja’s ability to move naturally between rock and classical music found its perfect expression in her project Beauty and the Beat, in collaboration with American drummer Mike Terrana. Accompanied by a symphonic orchestra and choir, the tour presented a unique programme that included, among others, Puccini, Mozart, Bach, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Tarja’s own songs. It was a step forward following the successful experiences of Classic and Divine in Miskolc, Hungary, in 2010 and at the Masters of Rock Festival in the Czech Republic the same year, but it was certainly not the last. Tarja once again shared the stage with a symphonic orchestra and choir for a special Orchestral Tour in Russia in March 2016. In August of the same year, she was also invited as a soloist by Kymi Sinfonietta in Finland to open their autumn season with two concerts: one at the Concert Hall in Kotka and an open-air performance in Kouvola for the Night of the Arts. The second concert gathered over 15,000 people in the city centre, setting both an audience record for the orchestra and a concert attendance record for the event. In more recent Christmas seasons, Tarja also joined the famous Finnish project Raskasta Joulua (“Metal Christmas”) as a special guest, sharing arena stages across Finland with well-known Finnish artists such as Marko Hietala and Tony Kakko, as well as international special guests including Joe Lynn Turner, Dee Snider and Bernie Shaw.
In 2017, Tarja released a bold and unexpected addition to her Christmas catalogue, From Spirits and Ghosts (Score for a Dark Christmas), giving a dark twist to traditional and popular Christmas carols. The album uniquely blends Tarja’s classically trained voice with gothic influences, evoking the atmosphere of a dark movie score. Following its release, the Concerts for a Dark Christmas tour presented the entire album live with a symphonic orchestra and choir, including sold-out concerts in the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia. Three years later, the album was released in a new special edition featuring the additional live album Christmas Together.
The concept proved so successful that the album was followed in 2023 by its highly anticipated sequel, Dark Christmas, for which Tarja once again teamed up with Jim Dooley and Tim Palmer. Utilising the sound of a grand orchestra and the playfulness of a children’s choir, she once again combined her enchanting voice with darker atmospheric influences, creating a cinematic and haunting reinterpretation of some of the world’s best-known Christmas songs.
The unique synergy between Tarja’s classical and rock inspirations is fully expressed in her solo rock career, which officially began when her first solo studio album, My Winter Storm, was released internationally by Universal Music in 2007 in more than 80 countries. The album achieved Gold Record Awards in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Germany, and Platinum Record Awards in Finland and Russia. The successful and unanimously praised debut album was followed by What Lies Beneath in 2010, reissued in 2024, and Colours in the Dark in 2013. Tarja’s next rock album, The Shadow Self, was released in 2016, accompanied by its prequel The Brightest Void. Both were recorded in different parts of the world and released by earMUSIC. Before hitting the road with the worldwide The Shadow Shows tour, The Brightest Summer tour brought Tarja’s music to the stages of some of the most important festivals across Europe, including Woodstock in Poland, where Tarja performed in front of her biggest audience to date: approximately 500,000 people.
Tarja’s next heavy rock creation, In The Raw, released in August 2019, marked another important milestone in her career: it not only fulfilled but even surpassed the promises and high expectations created by her previous releases. The album finds Tarja exploring raw, personal places in her lyrics, while its cover immortalises her in a stunning gold outfit inside St Michael’s Cave in Gibraltar. “Gold, we think, is something polished and perfect, sophisticated, a luxury, but in its natural state it’s a raw element,” explains Tarja. The same can be said of the music on the album: a combination of sophisticated and refined orchestration, choir and her classically trained voice with a raw, dark and heavy musical core. In The Raw features Björn “Speed” Strid, Tommy Karevik and Cristina Scabbia as special guests and has been praised as “a very versatile album that shows Tarja is still capable of grabbing and holding our attention after all these years” (Aardschok), while Lust For Life wrote: “The sonic landscape is very well balanced and as usual Tarja uses her gracious soprano voice to maneuver through all of it.”
As her fans all over the world know very well, the brightest star shines even brighter on stage. For Tarja, performing live has always been every bit as important as her work in the studio, and she has performed over one thousand shows worldwide throughout her career. Tarja’s rock concerts over the years have been immortalised in the live releases Act I, Act II and Luna Park Ride.
Act I combines two concerts recorded and filmed at the El Círculo Theatre in Rosario, Argentina, in March 2012 and released on CD, Vinyl, DVD and Blu-ray later that same year. Welcomed by enthusiastic reviews, Tarja’s first rock live release “manages to successfully capture all of the magic behind her live performances” (Lee Walker, Firebrand Magazine).
Act II followed six years later, filmed during The Shadow Shows world tour, which saw Tarja travel over 300,000 km and play more than 200 shows in 40 countries in front of one million people. Act II brings together two very different but complementary performances. The first is Metropolis Live, a very intimate set filmed and recorded live at Metropolis Studios in London, UK, two months prior to the release of The Shadow Self. Twenty lucky winners from across Europe had the privilege of hearing Tarja perform songs from her then-unreleased album for the first time in front of an audience. The second is the breathtaking live performance of The Shadow Shows concert in Milan, Italy, recorded and filmed in November 2016 at the magnificent Teatro della Luna. Even though the shows deliberately differ in look, sound, approach to the music and adrenaline, they have one thing in common: from the very first to the very last tune, the state-of-the-art production showcases Tarja’s energetic performance and her graceful, captivating stage presence.
Beyond her own releases, collaborations and special projects have always played an important role in Tarja’s career, ranging from the electronic project Outlanders, featuring lyrics inspired by the writer Paulo Coelho, to the all-star arena tour Rock Meets Classic in 2024. The classical project Noche Escandinava gave Tarja the unique opportunity to perform works by classical Finnish composers in South America in 2003 and 2004, and once again in 2018.
Tarja has successfully collaborated on recordings with Within Temptation, one of the leading names in Dutch symphonic rock, whose song with Tarja, Paradise (What About Us?), has accumulated more than 117 million views on YouTube; German electronic music artist Schiller, with whom Tarja co-wrote a song that was pre-nominated for the Grammy Awards in the USA; hard rock legend Doro Pesch; Scorpions, one of Germany’s most successful rock bands of all time; and Mike Oldfield, the British creator of the acclaimed Tubular Bells, with whom she co-wrote a song inspired and recorded in Antigua. Her more recent collaborations include Schandmaul for the song Zu zweit allein, Primal Fear for the single I Will Be Gone, and Marko Hietala for the duet Left on Mars.
After the eponymous single was presented in 2011, the Outlanders project with Torsten Stenzel was finally ready to be released digitally in 2021, one single at a time. Outlanders combines electronic music with Tarja’s soft and classical vocals, alongside electric and acoustic guitars. These three elements are a constant throughout all the songs and are equally important. The project features an extraordinary list of special guests on guitar: Trevor Rabin, Al Di Meola, Joe Satriani, Walter Giardino, Vernon Reid, Bumblefoot, Mike Oldfield, Jennifer Batten, Marty Friedman and Steve Rothery.
Tarja’s collaborations are not limited to the recording studio. She has shared tours and stages with an extraordinary range of artists, from Alice Cooper in 2009 to the more recent Living the Dream – Together world tour with her former bandmate Marko Hietala. In 2018, Tarja also shared the stage with Finnish power metal band Stratovarius for all 21 shows of their European tour A Nordic Symphony, and in 2024 she appeared as a special guest at 17 shows of Within Temptation’s Bleed Out tour in Europe.
Tarja was nominated for the Emma Award in Finland in 2006 and 2007 and for the Echo Award in Germany in 2007. She was the first Finnish solo artist to achieve a Gold Record in Germany and, moreover, the only one to achieve this both as a member of a band and as a solo artist. In 2015 and 2016, she also starred as a coach in two seasons of The Voice of Finland, one of the most-watched TV programs on Channel 4 in Finland, leading her team to victory two years in a row, a first in the history of the Finnish edition of the show.
While the COVID-19 global emergency put the Raw Tour on a forced hiatus, Tarja took the opportunity to write her first book. Frustrated at not being able to perform live and see her fans during 2020, Tarja revisited the great times she had experienced making music, performing live and meeting her fans. She looked through thousands of photos and recalled recording sessions, tours, photo shoots and conversations, ultimately creating Singing In My Blood. The book saw the light of day in 2021, published by Rocket 88, and has since also been translated into Finnish and Portuguese.
After more than a decade of her solo career, it was finally time to celebrate. The Best of Tarja: A Night To Remember brought together the best of Tarja’s prolific solo career in two extraordinary concerts in January 2020 in the Czech Republic and Romania. For this landmark event, Tarja invited 16 performers to once again, for most of them, share the stage with her, celebrating years of music and friendship. The second concert in particular, filmed and recorded at the Metropolitan Circus in Bucharest, was something Tarja’s fans had never seen before, with people flying from across Europe to attend the unprecedented sold-out event. What they experienced was an enchanting and unique show performed on a round stage in the middle of the hall, offering a 360° view of the centre stage and creating an unusually close connection between artist and audience. A truly unforgettable night.
Two years after those unique concerts came Tarja’s next gift to her fans: the Best Of – Living The Dream album, a special retrospective celebrating the first fifteen years of the singer’s solo career. It features her best-known tracks, many newly remastered at Sterling Sound, as well as her personal favourites from her six studio albums. Hand-picked by Tarja herself, the compilation was released by earMUSIC in 2022 in a wide variety of formats, featuring exclusive rarities, upgraded versions of Tarja’s music videos, the new single Eye Of The Storm, and the two-hour Circus Life concert, immortalising the Bucharest Metropolitan Circus show on Blu-ray.
Tarja spent the next four years touring the world with the Living the Dream tour, while also continuing her traditional Christmas shows and taking part in international tours with other artists, including the very last edition of the legendary Rock Meets Classic in Germany.
At the same time, a new chapter was taking shape. Tarja was composing new music that would eventually become one of the darkest and most ambitious records of her solo career. Released in June 2026, Frisson Noir marks a new chapter for Tarja, combining the cinematic and symphonic elements that have always been part of her musical identity with a darker, heavier and more intense metal sound, and featuring guest appearances by Marko Hietala, Apocalyptica, Dani Filth and Chad Smith.
The album was produced by Tarja and Mic, mixed by Grammy-winning producer and engineer Neal Avron, and mastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound.
Tarja is now taking Frisson Noir on the road, bringing the new album to audiences around the world. More than three decades after taking her first steps as a professional artist, she continues to evolve without abandoning the musical contrasts that have defined her career: classical and metal, beauty and darkness, intimacy and spectacle. With a new album and an extensive international touring schedule ahead, Tarja continues to look forward, still searching for new sounds, new challenges and new ways to connect with audiences around the world.
