Antti Ikonen

Antti Ikonen — Finnish keyboardist — was Nightwish's keyboard player during the band's formative phase, between 1996 and 2001. That is the phase in which symphonic metal was invented as a genre. Nightwish began as an acoustic project by Tuomas Holopainen and turned into a metal band fronted by a lyric soprano — a combination nobody had established as a formula before. Ikonen is on Angels Fall First (1997), Oceanborn (1998) and Wishmaster (2000), precisely the records on which that formula was found and refined. The situation was peculiar: Holopainen is himself a keyboardist and composes at the keyboard, which meant the band had two musicians on the same instrument. In practice Ikonen performed live what Holopainen wrote, allowing the studio material — dense orchestral layers — to be reproduced on stage. He left the group in 2001, before Century Child, the record on which Nightwish began recording with a real orchestra. The band would later become the biggest in symphonic metal worldwide, but the sonic structure sustaining that success was built in the phase Ikonen was part of.