Ahead of this year’s Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, violinist Hugo Ticciati describes the special atmosphere of this Finnish summer event.
Kuhmo is a liberating paradox for body and soul. Six hundred kilometres northeast of Helsinki, 100 kilometres from the nearest train station and airport, with bears and wolves making their homes in the woods that line the adjacent expanses of inland waterways, Kuhmo is remote but not isolated. This is because the world comes to Kuhmo in the form of the musical culture that is celebrated in this unassuming Finnish town for two weeks every July. It’s fitting that one of the world’s most important chamber music festivals takes place not in Paris, London or Berlin or any of the other great centres of international culture, but in Kuhmo. It reminds us that the artistic traditions that we, as practising musicians, inherit and disseminate have encompassing aims. Exploring and expressing the human spirit in its innumerable manifestations, the arts help us to define our relationship with the universe we inhabit: the world of nature, and of space and time. To discover “a world in a grain of sand”, wrote William Blake, to “hold infinity in the palm of your hand”, and find “eternity in an hour”: the paradox of art is also that of Kuhmo.
The adventure proper begins when the urban bustle slowly becomes a distant memory, as I travel down a long road fringed on each side by tall pines, with not a soul in sight. For company, I have my constant travelling companion: my instrument, a violin made by Guadagnini in Milan in 1751, that is safely encased. At this time of year, in midsummer, when the northern light barely fades, the road I am taking leads only to one destination: Kuhmo, nestling amid lakes Ontojärvi, Lammasjärvi and Lentua, beside the protected wilderness that is Hiidenportti National Park.
The principal venue is another paradoxical wonder: the Kuhmo Arts Centre, seating audiences of more than 650 people, with its spacious entrance hall, designed in a style that might be called cordially Modernist. The reception area has floor-to-ceiling windows – walls of glass that shield visitors from the elements but also provide vistas on to the world outside. Enclosed within the contemporary structure is the beautiful wooden concert hall with its exquisitely-designed acoustics. Hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, or so it seems, I find myself in a new building (completed in 1993) that represents the very best our modern culture is capable of: the quintessence of civilised living, you might say. A ten-minute walk away lies Kuhmo church, another main festival venue, which evokes the town’s history. Built of wood in 1816 on the plan of a Greek cross – a central square and four branching arms – this is a space from another era that connects with the Arts Centre via shared values of purity and simplicity.
Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, which takes place over two weeks in July, is known among musicians – friends and colleagues – as the mother of chamber music festivals. The event welcomes more than 150 artists to play in about 70 concerts that are enjoyed by audiences who make their way to Kuhmo from all corners of the earth. The scale of the festival can be told by way of a few numbers: the town of Kuhmo is inhabited by around 8,500 people; this is doubled during the festival period, with 35,000 concert visits in total. Its growth since the inaugural edition in 1970, when about 800 people attended, is phenomenal. Since 2005 the artistic director has been the unique Vladimir Mendelssohn (“Vlady”), who has deployed his vast knowledge and irresistible imaginative energy to create programmes of rare and beautiful eclecticism. Kuhmo audiences are treated not only to the best-loved works from the repertoire of indispensable classics but also to an extraordinary range of new music. To paraphrase John Cage: “we invent the past and revise the future.” In this spirit, Kuhmo aims to remove music from the box of convention.