In mid-July, rooms start at $270 at $1.26 to the euro. The ideal base for cultural excursions, if you can afford it, is the Hotel Kamp. Starbucks has only lately established a beachhead local brands are far more common.

For decades, Finland was terra incognita to American tourists and it shows. There's an extensive and efficient trolley system and taxis accept credit cards. Eliel Saarinen's gray granite Art Nouveau train station in the city center is one among dozens of modern architectural landmarks. Helsinki is the hub and, apart from its musical offerings, has a calm, dignified profile. And yet even in the gloom of a Finnish winter, in concert halls and churches and music academies, the variety and level of performances is exceptionally high.

6) and the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival (July 17 to 31) are highly celebrated and well attended. The opera festival in the castle at Savonlinna (July 8 to Aug. Summer is the traditional season to visit Finland for music. But last November I heard him in the Finnish provincial city of Lahti, where he often conducts the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in a striking new jewel box of a hall. Vanska has been widely lauded for reviving the fortunes of the Minnesota Orchestra, where he is music director. The conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Osmo Vanska, Sakari Oramo, and Mikko Franck the singers Jorma Hynninen, Matti Salminen, Soile Isokoski and Karita Mattila the violinists Pekka and Jaakko Kuusisto and the composers Aulis Sallinen, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Kaija Saariaho, and Magnus Lindberg have spent a good part of their careers abroad.īut Finns can often catch them on their visits home. Steady investment in music education by the government has created generations of avid listeners and, according to official figures, more orchestras per capita than anywhere on the globe.įinland's tiny market guarantees that a number of its musical stars must be exported. Defying a trend in many Western countries, where audiences are dwindling and the tradition itself seems in retreat, Finland has in the last 15 years developed first-class classical musicians out of all proportion to its size. The Finns' recent emergence as a power in classical music is another case in which they have mastered a lingua franca.

While they hold dearly to the foundations of their national culture, such as the 'Kalevala' epic, they also compete internationally in an eclectic array of fields, from cell phone technology to javelin-throwing, and from contemporary architecture and design to ski-jumping. This is the problem faced by the Finns, and among their many admirable traits has been shrewd adaptation to this exigency. WHEN you live in a country of only 5.2 million people and your native tongue is unintelligible to virtually everyone outside your borders, you'd better learn to converse with the rest of the world if you don't want to end up talking to yourself.

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