Emerging as one of Finland’s most prominent musical figures at home and abroad, Jaakko Kuusisto built a multifaceted career that spanned violin performance, conducting, and composition. Few Finnish artists of his generation appeared on disc as frequently; his catalog featured major statements by national composers such as Jean Sibelius alongside leading contemporary voices.
Born in Helsinki on January 17, 1974, Kuusisto grew up alongside his violinist brother Pekka Kuusisto, and the pair performed double-concerto repertoire together while still children. During the 1990s both siblings captured prizes in domestic and international violin competitions. Their training began at East Helsinki Music College before continuing at the Sibelius Academy under Tuomas Haapanen; the brothers later pursued graduate studies at Indiana University, where Miriam Fried and Paul Biss served as their mentors.
Kuusisto’s assessment of the American musical landscape was measured: he observed to Finnish Music Quarterly that Indiana’s orchestral training emphasized routine rehearsal habits, yet he also faulted Finnish attitudes as excessively “snooty” toward American compositional output, remarking that “We should, after all, remember that some of the best composers of today are at Hollywood,” and that it is “high time the Finns learnt to accept that not all countries create music in the same way as they do and that other approaches may be equally good.” He himself explored jazz, recording with the Trio Töykeat.
His discography appeared on BIS, Ondine, and Finlandia. He introduced himself on BIS with a program of Sibelius’s early pieces within the label’s comprehensive Sibelius edition and later contributed additional violin installments to the same project. Concertante works by Rautavaara, Sallinen, and Aho also featured among his recordings. Between 1999 and 2012 he held the concertmaster chair of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and participated in numerous recordings with the ensemble. As a conductor he appeared with leading Finnish orchestras, the Minnesota Orchestra, and three major Australian ensembles.
He supplied arrangements and orchestrations for several of the scores he led, among them the opera Indigo by cellists Eicca Toppinen and Perttu Kivilaakso. Already a symphonist at age nine, Kuusisto ultimately produced more than forty compositions, including the family opera The Canine Kalevala. BIS assembled his chamber output on the 2016 album Glow. A violin concerto written for Elina Vähälä received performances from the Minnesota Orchestra and the Detroit and Singapore Symphonies; in 2019 a cello concerto was premiered by Arto Noras at Finland’s Naantali Music Festival. Kuusisto conducted Vähälä in a 2013 recording of the violin concerto coupled with John Corigliano’s Concerto for violin and orchestra “The Red Violin.” Between 2015 and 2020 he released four albums on BIS and one on Ondine; the former label issued his account of the Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin in 2019, followed the next year by a program of Kalevi Aho chamber music. Kuusisto succumbed to brain cancer in February 2022.
