Kuhmo Chamber Music Again Listed among the Best Festivals in Europe
25.5.2023
BBC Music Magazine has compiled a list of the top 29 classical-music festivals in Europe. The list was recently published on the Classical Music website. Kuhmo Chamber Music is the only Finnish festival to be featured on the list.
Kuhmo Chamber Music has received many similar accolades in the past too. Between 2008 and 2012, the Austrian music magazine Die Festspiele ranked Kuhmo Chamber Music as being among the 15 best festivals in the world, in 2003 the Financial Times ranked Kuhmo among the top four festivals in the world, saying “Anything after Kuhmo is a come down”, and in 2007 the Independent on Sunday ranked Kuhmo among the top 10 summer festivals anywhere in the world.
Kuhmo Chamber Music has garnered many words of praise throughout its long history. As long ago as 1989, the American publication Connoisseur wrote that every July Kuhmo hosts a festival that is “possibly the best anywhere”. In the summer of 2013, the Norwegian Klassisk Musikkmagasin wrote an article with a headline calling Kuhmo “A Chamber-Music Mecca”. Meanwhile, in 2014 the Financial Times claimed that “if you care about music more than you care about being seen, you are addicted to integrity, and you prefer discovery to the comfort zone of the familiar, there is simply no reason not to go to Kuhmo in July”.
In the summer of 2018, Kuhmo Chamber Music was awarded the Italian ‘Cremona Musica Award’, and in their accompanying statement the Italian judges said simply that “Kuhmo Chamber Music is the Stradivari of the festivals”.
“It feels wonderful to receive praise of this calibre, especially when more such comments seem to come year upon year. In its long history, now spanning over 50 years, Kuhmo Chamber Music has achieved an indisputable position among the top 50 festivals in the world and has managed to maintain that position for some time,” says the festival’s executive director Sari Rusanen.
Kuhmo Chamber Music will take place for the 53rd time from 9th–22nd July 2023. The theme of this year’s festival is ‘Roots and Wings’. This is the first programme to be exclusively planned by our new artistic directors, the violinists Minna Pensola and Antti Tikkanen. Our roots help us pay homage to the history of the festival and to the genre of chamber music itself, while our wings carry us in new, uncharted directions. This summer’s programme includes over 60 concerts and 20 fringe event and features a line-up of over 100 internationally acclaimed artists.
Link to the article: Europe’s best classical music festivals | Classical Music (classical-music.com)
For more information:
Kuhmo Chamber Music, tel. +358 44 544 5162
