Dead Musician Jaakko Kuusisto is dead

Composer, violinist and conductor Jaakko Kuusisto died on Wednesday, February 23 in Oulu. Kuusisto had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in the summer of 2020. The tumor was excised in the same year. At the beginning of 2022, however, Kuusisto’s brother, violinist Pekka Kuusisto, announced that his condition had deteriorated and that he had been hospitalized.

Kuusisto was born in Helsinki on January 17, 1974 and was 48 years old when he died. He was born into a family of music: his grandfather was the composer Taneli Kuusisto and his father the composer Ilkka Kuusisto. Brothers Jaakko and Pekka started playing the violin at an early age and were seen on television in 1986, for example. Violin Violins in the Land of Music in the program.

Both of the brothers have since succeeded brilliantly as violinists. The whole family moved with the boys to the United States in the early 1990s so they could study violin at Indiana University in Bloomington as students of Miriam Fried. Even before that, Jaakko Kuusisto had shared the victory of the Kuopio Violin Competition with Pekka Kauppinen in 1989 and, like Kauppinen, reached the finals of the International Sibelius Violin Competition in 1990. The next Sibelius Competition in 1995 was won by his little brother Pekka Kuusisto.

This is how Miriam Fried compared her violin brothers when she visited Finland in 1998: “Pekka plays more instinctively, while Jaakko is more intellectual and exploratory.”

After playing in the final of the Queen Elisabeth Violin Competition in Brussels in 1997, Jaakko Kuusisto received a call from Osmo Vänskä, chief conductor of the Lahti City Orchestra, who asked Kuusisto to replace the then concertmaster who had left the orchestra.

This is the beginning of Jaakko Kuusisto’s many years of work as the concertmaster of Sinfonia Lahti. In that role, he played on many of the orchestra’s significant recordings and was instrumental in elevating Sinfonia Lahti to an international top orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä.

Kuusisto played as a soloist with the recordings of Sinfonia Lahti and Vänskä from Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Violin Concerto and Kalevi Aho Sinfonia concertantesta. He also recorded Uljas Pulkkis as a soloist Enchanted Garden with the conductor Susanna Mälk and the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and the violin concerts of J. S. Bach together with Pekka Kuusisto and the Tapiola Sinfonietta. With pianist Folke Gräsbeck, he recorded Jean Sibelius’s early chamber music production.

As his violin career progressed, Kuusisto also worked more and more as a composer and conductor, until in 2012 he left Sinfonia Lahti as a concertmaster and became a freelance artist. He visited the conductors of several Finnish and foreign orchestras and worked as the main guest of the Oulu Symphony from 2005 to 2009. He has been the chief conductor of the Kuopio City Orchestra since 2018.

In addition to symphony orchestras, he also worked as an opera conductor and conducted performances of his own operas at the Savonlinna Opera Festival, the National Opera and the Ilmajoki Music Festival.

As a composer, he achieved perhaps his greatest popularity in his opera Ice, based on Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s Finlandia Prize-winning novel and commissioned by the National Opera. It was premiered in January 2019, and Kuusisto also managed to compose a smaller version of the work, which could be performed in the autumn of 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic.

Kuusisto also gained popularity with his previous operas, the whole family opera composed for the Savonlinna Opera Festival The Kalevala of dogs (2003) and Bedroom Opera (2009) and Camping Opera (2012) and an opera about Oskar Merikanto For life (2015).

Kuusisto’s catalog includes about 40 compositions, and in addition to operas, he also composed chamber and orchestral music. In an interview with HS in December 2019, the composer and guitarist Pete Townshend of the British band The Who announced that Jaakko Kuusisto’s violin concerto had “exploded his consciousness” – Kuusisto composed the concert in 2012 on the order of violinist Elina Vähälä. Kuusisto also composed piano, bassoon, trumpet and cello concerts.

In operas and concerts, Kuusisto was at his best as a composer.

“I am a melodic, of course,” Jaakko Kuusisto said in an interview with HS before Iceopera premiere in January 2019.

“I feel like I have my own way and style of perceiving melody and harmony. I move in areas where the tonality is starting to blur. ”

Like his father Ilkka Kuusisto, Jaakko Kuusisto was a trusted music professional who was able to perform many tasks. In addition to his own compositions, he was a trusted arranger and orchestra. For example, he orchestra Iiro Rantala’s piano concerto GismajAs and Apicalyptica cellists Eicca Toppinen and Perttu Kivilaakso Indigo-operan. Kuusisto also conducted the performances of these works, in the premiere and recording of the Rantala concert, Indigo performances at the National Opera, which commissioned the work.

Kuusisto also worked as an artistic director: in Tuusulanjärvi chamber music with his brother Peka in 1999–2006 and at the Oulu Music Festival 2013–2021.

Jaakko Kuusisto also held positions of trust. In 2016–2019, he was a member of the Arts Council, and in 2016–2017 he chaired a working group aimed at reforming the state contribution system. In the spring of 2021, he was elected to the municipal council of his hometown, Oulu City Council, from the Green List. He had also been awarded a five-year artist professorship at the Center for the Promotion of the Arts from the beginning of 2022.

His spouse Together with Maija Kuusisto, Jaakko Kuusisto established a boat taxi service in Savonlinna, where they took the guests of the Savonlinna Opera Festival to perform during the summer. “We are boating in the summers, and I guess it was just a matter of how much fun it would be to drive opera guests by boat and tell us something about operas at the same time,” Jaakko Kuusisto said in an interview with Forum24 magazine in Oulu in the summer of 2019.

Maija Kuusisto is Jaakko Kuusisto’s third spouse, whom she met through the Oulu Symphony: she works as the curator of the Oulu Symphony. Jaakko Kuusisto has two children from the previous union.

Correction at 18.07: Contrary to what was originally written in the article, Maija Kuusisto is Jaakko Kuusisto’s third, not her second spouse.