At the Sibelius Festival, Don’t Think of Finland

There’s not a great deal about the city of Lahti that yields itself readily to a first-time international visitor. It bustles—retail is certainly thriving in its centre—but its cultural heart isn’t immediately obvious. Its waterside developments are clean and purposeful, standing guard, almost, over the decades-long clean-up of Vesijärvi: a lake poisoned by the same industry that built the 120-year-old city.

Perched on the edge of that calm expanse of water is Sibelius Hall, now 26 years old: a legacy of an era-defining chapter in the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s history, when Chief Conductor Osmo Vänskä established its international reputation with landmark, award-winning Sibelius recordings. Built onto the side of a remnant of Lahti’s industrial past, Sibelius Hall’s light-filled front-of-house looks out over the tranquil Lake Vesijärvi — a view most of the audience seemed to ignore during the interval at the opening night of the Sibelius Festival, when they drift past the rope for a proper look at the water. Stunning as the view is, the Hall’s acoustic is its defining characteristic. Clear and detailed, the space takes no prisoners and makes silences immediate and potentially deadly for anyone who hasn’t switched their phone to silent. Symphonic forces are amply accommodated by it as readily as it supports chamber music. This is a listening experience akin to a live studio recording.

In this way, the hall more visibly plays a key role in performance. Musicianship not simply in technique but in listening is ramped up. This was evident in electrifying performances in this year’s Sibelius Festival that make the listener sit up straight and pay attention as though they’re a member of ensemble themselves.

Scrunchy string flourishes open Strauss’ Don Juan in the opening concert of Festival. Later, brass articulation tightly aligned with the string staccatos has a visceral effect too. A little further in, a plaintive oboe solo from Lasse Junttila draws a tender response from principal clarinettist Mäenluoma — a small, unshowy exchange the hall makes easy to follow. The horn section, just four players, somehow suggests a far larger orchestra behind them — distant, layered, more than their number should allow. There are moments when snatched fortissimo chords leave us all momentarily stunned in the clear dead gap that follows. We’re confused for a second: have we reached the end of the work, or has some kind of unprecedented musical disaster befallen all on stage. If there’s a caveat, it’s that the fortissimos occasionally tip toward too loud, and once or twice the silence that snaps in afterward feels slightly too abrupt to be comfortable. This acoustic adds to the excitement by making demands on the musician and affording more extreme dynamic contrasts.

Jean Sibelius Competition winner Inmo Yang benefits too. Not yet thirty when he won in 2022, he plays like someone who’s had this concerto his whole life and is still discovering it fresh on the night. The conflict between soloist and orchestra is in the narrative, not in an adversarial sound balance. From the first movement, the tone is crystal clear, bright, solid — self-assured and mature, and consistent across registers, in a way I don’t hear often from London performances. In the second movement, his expressive range is immense, the acoustic intensifying his sound at the same time as reducing the usual ambience created by an audience. Everyone is motionless in the auditorium, attention focused on his evident stillness as he draws out one long expansive line after another.

The following afternoon, in recital with pianist Ossi Tanner, the same discipline pays off again: the hall’s false proximity makes his hesitations, and the resolutions that follow them, feel almost too intimate to be public. His approach to the Strauss Violin Sonata (a work that materially casts shade on Franck’s ever-popular sonata composed a year before) is like opening a window wide on a spring morning. Strauss’ writing helps here, but more Yang’s instinctive interpretation. Sudden dynamic shifts are full-powered and exhilarating. When he slips into a pianissimo the sound evokes the texture of that papery protective covering found on fresh-out-of-the-packaging electronic equipment. The transition into the final movement sees pianist Ossi Tanner’s musicianship holding firm amid a tense pivot, emphasised more fully in the digital catch-up available online.

Lahti Symphony was the first orchestra in the world to start regular concert broadcasts online, via ClassicLive, back in 2007. That they were doing that then is evidence of the facility being designed into the building in 2000. Today, live streams of the Festival concerts feature modest presenter-led links occupying a small space front of house. Catch-up is promoted in print and appreciated the morning after. Frictionless access. Free.

The uncompromising ambient studio sound is carried through to digital too — in the concert the night before, you can even hear the conductor turning pages — and it carries straight through into the recordings themselves, unfussy and polished in equal measure, whether you’re in the room or watching later online. Lahti understand digital. It’s sophisticated, realistic, serving the audience they have and know well, rather than the one they’re eyeing over their shoulder. There’s no marketing hype in any of it — refreshingly reassuring, best practice letting the music speak for itself. All of it, in the end, comes back to the hall: an acoustic that serves the musician and pleases the audience is, by virtue of its own studio-grade ambience, doing highly-sophisticated work that refuses to bow to meaningless social media twaddle, and lets the quality of the performance speak for itself.

Symphonically, Sibelius’ Viennese-infused Valse Triste is a condensed illustration of this very point. It also points to the mild innovation Festival artistic director Hannu Lintu has dared to introduce in programming three years of Sibelius Festivals all in one go. By the standards of festival programming generally — where genre-hopping and unlikely juxtapositions are often the whole point — this is caution, not daring. But caution is relative to the institution making it, and for a festival that had never once stepped outside Sibelius in 25 years, even this modest widening does real work — it throws light on an aspect of the composer that a London audience, hearing Symphony No. 2 in isolation, would likely never get to see.

Sibelius is presented here not as Finland’s composer, but one with connections and influences that span the continent and the period. “His circle of friends included some of the most important international musicians of the era,” writes Lintu in the programme notes, “As part of the Sibelius Festival we want to show what those connections mean in practice.” Strauss opens the first concert and is reflected in the afternoon chamber music concert too. His friendship with Busoni is reflected in the comparatively hollow epic 64 minute Piano Concerto performed by Kirill Gerstein on the second night.

What remains with this gentlest of programming changes is to emphasise less the nationalism in Sibelius’ writing, more his complexity and mastery. When we return to those core Sibelius works, we hear not only the musicianship of the orchestral musicians, but a richness of the writing that gets masked when it’s heard away from its home turf.

Sibelius 2 as heard in Lahti on the opening night of this year’s Festival is not the marketing-inspired imagery of rolling hills and pride in one’s national identity. Rather, universal messages of defiance and hope in the face of oppression, whatever that means on an individual basis. Gratifyingly, the programme notes — bold, proud and assertive — don’t direct thinking, leaving the music and the performance in this case to stimulate a personal response. All this again, in part, down to the acoustic. If you want to understand Sibelius, head to Sibelius Hall in Lahti and listen to Sibelius 2 — and don’t think of Finland.

The Sibelius Festival is in truth more of a Sibelius-heavy immersion that opens the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s 26/27 concert season. No bad thing. Lintu’s directorship of the Festival offers discovery made manifest in a group of musicians who know what they have to do to make the acoustic work for them. A considerable infrastructure is available to whoever takes on the next Chief Conductor role of the Symphony Orchestra, following Dalia Stasevska’s departure from the role in May 2025. Lintu is explicitly not that person, given the clear messaging the orchestra gave out when he was appointed Artistic ‘Partner’ in 2024.

What happens after 2027 appears unresolved. Everything Lahti have built – an acoustic created and put to good use, programming that is allowed to breathe, and a willingness to allow the music speak for itself – isn’t a problem to solve but something to preserve. This is evident in three decades’ worth of international awards still proudly on display front of house. Whoever comes next needs to see that too, and build on it rather than over it.