”Being a composer in Finland" means above all capturing the intellectual mood, and this also involves an understanding of the country's own traditions."

In 1994 FMQ addressed this question to two very significant, and oh so very different Finnish composer personalities, Paavo Heininen and Einojuhani Rautavaara. Tapani Länsiö, himself...

“The world's best bass player”. Pekka Pohjola had this dinned into him all through the seventies: he was the Jaco Pastorius of the North, a man...

When the biography of Oskar Merikanto was published in 1950, it was subtitled “A household name in Finland”. And although romanticising biographies were all the vogue...

This year [1992] Finland becomes 75. Our years of independence are being celebrated with exhibitions, speeches and commemorative gold coins. The country has changed in many...

Barely having finished Joy, the last part of his orchestral trilogy to which his earlier works Kinetics and Marea also belong, and also the Piano Concerto,...

"Kullervo is a five-movement composition which depicts the main events from the (Kalevala) hero's life. The depiction is so vivid and so completely Finnish that at...

"The 'Finnish element' - if indeed it even exists in the empirical sense - is no unique property; it is the sum of numerous factors each...

"Out of experiment and splintered ideas has developed a powerful new mode of musical expression commanding its own set of rules – even though now here...