The Lahti SO gained once again recognition from the international press

The Austrian Broadcast Corporation ORF published an article on the front page of its website on 15 February 2005 telling how Lahti, which has formerly been known as a skiing city, has now become ‘a new Mecca of classical music’. In the article it says that music has become a permanent part of everyday life for people in Lahti and how statistically almost 60% of the inhabitants of Lahti go to the concerts of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra every year. As an important motor for the musical success of Lahti the article names Chief Conductor Osmo Vänskä who has made the Lahti Symphony orchestra a celebrated ensemble also internationally and who ‘wakes the audience up from the drowse around the world’. The article points out the importance of Sibelius for the Finnish music life and also for both the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Vänskä, who have become internationally known much due to their highly recognized Sibelius recordings. According to the article, Finland as a nation of music may soon shake off the traditional music country Austria, as it has already happened in the PISA research, which compares the learning results of pupils in different countries.

A major American magazine The New Yorker published on 8 February a big article ‘Osmosis’ by Alex Ross, in which Osmo Vänskä is named ‘the latest Finnish phenomenon’. In the article it says that Vänskä is hugely popular as the Music Director of the Minnesota Orchestra. As an example Ross mentions a performance of the Seventh Symphony ‘Insect Symphony’ by the composer-in-residence of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra Kalevi Aho in Minneapolis, which got ‘a yelling ovation’ from the audience and ‘no one was talking about Mozart on the way out’. Ross tells that in the past few years Vänskä has gone from relative obscurity to the front ranks of conductors’ and thanks to his Sibelius recordings with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra on the BIS label, ‘word spread that Vänskä had somehow put together a first-class ensemble in a town of a hundred thousand people’. Ross tells that Vänskä brought the Lahti Symphony Orchestra to the Avery Fisher Hall in January 2005 as the final concert of the US tour of the orchestra, and in the successful concert Sibelius’s Second Symphony ‘rocked the house’. In the article Ross admires the music life in Finland also generally, and he estimates that the music education system in Finland ‘may be the best in the world’. Finland ‘views music as a national pastime, not as an élite pursuit’ and in Ross’s opinion ‘the fact that Sibelius’s face appeared on the hundred-markan bill encapsulates this synergy of the economic and the artistic’. Ross underlines Sibelius’s great role in Finnish music, but points out also the importance of Finnish contemporary composers such as Aho, Aulis Sallinen and Einojuhani Rautavaara. As an example Ross mentions the recording of the Eighth Symphony by Rautavaara done by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Vänskä (BIS-CD-1315), and says that in the symphony ‘long, songful, freely flowing phrases reach out for worlds that are long gone and perhaps never were’.


The article by the ORF as a whole:
http://www.orf.at/050208-83556/index.html

The article by The New Yorker as a whole:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/?050214crmu_music