Avanti! the chamber orchestra’s traditional Summer Music Festival is here to stay. The positive funding decision by the Ministry of Education was based on the support of the Chamber Orchestra and the festival’s home towns, as well as the Finnish Cultural Foundation. The city of Porvoo has been the home of Suvisoito since the first Suvisoito. The festival programme will be announced in mid-May.
The planners of this year’s Suvisoito have been Avant-garde since the very beginning. The trio of Timo Ahtinen, Hanna Juutilainen and Jukka Rautasalo have taken an Avant-garde approach to planning, covering music from as wide a time span as possible, with old and new running strongly in parallel. “What is old, what is new?”
Most of the concerts of the Summer Music Festival will be held at the Art Factory, but the whole of Friday 29.6. will be spent on Porvoo’s Church Hill and the evening concerts at the Tuomiokirko. As always before, the Suvisoito evening will be held in the medieval church of Pernaja on 27 June.
Avanti! is coming, are you ready?
The recent turmoil at Avant has of course affected the work of the designers, and Avanti! would not be Avanti! if it did not comment sharply on society and its oddities through art. It may well be that something Kafkaesque will emerge from the programme.
This year’s conductors are Sakari Oramo and Dima Slobodeniouk, and Anu Komsi is one of the festival’s soloists. New works by Olli Virtaperko, Jarkko Hartikainen and Heinz-Juhani Hoffmann will be premiered. The XXXIII Suvisoitto is also a festival of early music in Avant-garde style. “The programme includes new music, old music and music that has been forgotten and abused,” say the planners.
The Summer Concert programme will be announced on Wednesday 16 May, when ticket sales will also start. According to the design trio, the Suvisoito is made up of “past, present and future Avant-gardists and listeners who draw their vitality from culture and music.”
Avant’s Midsummer Call
The Summer Music Festival was founded in 1986. Porvoo, chosen as the festival city, naturally incorporated Avant into its identity: “The city of the river, the hills, two languages, two medieval squares, narrow streets, old houses, international trade, Runeberg, European fine arts, books, reality and symbols, and now Avant, warmly welcomes every music lover.”
33. The software of Suvisoito implements Avanti! thinking in its purest form. This year, the festival fanfare will ring out on Church Hill on Friday, celebrating more than 30 years of a boundless musical event.
