Orchestras and Conductors
Orchestras and Conductors
The finalists of the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition will perform in the Concert Hall of the Helsinki Music Centre from May 27 to 29, 2025, together with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Pekka Kuusisto and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk.
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
When Robert Kajanus established an orchestra in Helsinki in 1882, his ambitious plan was to gather together the city’s best musicians and others recruited from abroad – some 36 in all – in order to give the people of Helsinki a chance to hear great musical masterpieces at a series of weekly concerts. The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra premiered most of the symphonic works by Jean Sibelius with the composer himself conducting and continues its commitment to contemporary music by commissioning works by composers both Finnish and foreign.
Now a band of 102 musicians, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra has become an important constituent of its host city’s cultural capital. It also reaches people who for one reason or another cannot attend concerts at the Helsinki Music Centre, for in addition to making international tours, it sends small ensembles out across the city, provides opportunities for young people to perform and, through its active education programme, is able to make contact with special groups.
The HPO concerts and background interviews screened live or recorded on the Internet makes the process of creating a piece of music even more readily accessible. The orchestra’s partnership with the BIS label further ensures that HPO performances are available to all both now and well into the future in state-of-the-art recordings. The orchestra has a three-member Artistic Leadership Team, which comprises Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Co-director Pekka Kuusisto and Composer-in-Residence Samy Moussa.
Pekka Kuusisto, Conductor
Pekka Kuusisto is one of Finland’s most renowned and internationally successful musicians. With the opening of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2023/24 concert season, Kuusisto started his three-year term as Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Co-director as a member of the Artistic Leadership Team responsible for planning the programme.
Kuusisto grew up in a musical family and started playing the violin at the age of three. His solo career really kicked off after he won the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in 1995. Since then, his work has taken him at an accelerating pace to all continents throughout the world.
His regular workplaces currently include Oslo (Norwegian Chamber Orchestra), Bremen (Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie), Berlin (Mahler Chamber Orchestra) and San Francisco (San Francisco Symphony), and Helsinki.
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FRSO) is the orchestra of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle), and its mission is to produce and promote Finnish musical culture.
The Radio Orchestra of ten players founded in 1927 grew to symphony orchestra proportions in the 1960s. Its Chief Conductors have been Toivo Haapanen, Nils-Eric Fougstedt, Paavo Berglund, Okko Kamu, Leif Segerstam, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Sakari Oramo, Hannu Lintu, and as of autumn 2021 Nicholas Collon.
In addition to the great Classical-Romantic masterpieces, the latest contemporary music is a major item in the repertoire of the FRSO, which each year premieres a number of Yle commissions. Another of the orchestra’s tasks is to record all Finnish orchestral music for the Yle archive.
The FRSO has recorded works by Mahler, Bartók, Sibelius, Hakola, Lindberg, Saariaho, Sallinen, Kaipainen, Kokkonen and others. It has won a Gramophone Award three times: for its disc of Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto in 2006, of Bartók Violin Concertos in 2018 and for its album of orchestral works by Lotta Wennäkoski in 2023. In 2023, the orchestra was nominated for Gramophone’s Orchestra of the Year award. Other distinctions have included BBC Music Magazine, Académie Charles Cros, MIDEM Classical awards and Grammy nominations in 2020 and 2021. Its disc of tone poems and songs by Sibelius won an International Classical Music Award (ICMA) in 2018, and it has been the recipient of a Finnish EMMA award in 2016 and 2019.
Dima Slobodeniouk, Conductor
Conductor Dima Slobodeniouk held the position of Music Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia in 2013-2022 and Chief Conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in 2016-2021. Internationally sought-after Slobodeniouk works with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Boston and London Symphony Orchestras, Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich and Amsterdam Concertgeboworkest Amsterdam. In 2024/25 he will make debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestras.
In summer 2025, he will conduct Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in Finland. He has previously conducted the same work at the Bavarian State Opera.
Dima Slobodeniouk graduated as a violinist from the Sibelius Academy in 2001 and then went on to the conducting class, where he studied under Leif Segerstam, Jorma Panula and Atso Almila.
