An Arctic festival

The origins of the Kuhmo festival are like one of those let’s-do-the-show right here Hollywood musicals. Back in 1970 a young Finnish cellist called Seppo Kimanen was looking around for a place to start a summer chamber music festival. He remembered a place in central Finland, close to the Russian border and not far from the Arctic circle where his father used to fish. An idyllic spot on a vast lake: great for fishing; less obviously attractive as a venue for chamber music concerts. But that was the place he chose for his festival – and 33 years later it is one of the most famous in the world.

Kimanen, now in his mid-50s and with a pianist son performing, still runs the festival. And, even more remarkably, Tuulikki Karjalainen, the woman who ran Kuhmo’s amateur music society back in 1970 and who worked with Kimanen on the inaugural festival, is now the executive director of a two-week event that stages 80 concerts and sells more than 40,000 tickets. This says something about loyalty but also Finns’ complete lack of pomposity: the festival has grown in size but hasn’t added too many layers of self-consciousness.

You get some sense of the magnitude of their achievement by reading the potted history of the festival. “In 1974 concerts were held at the Lentiira church. The musicians praised the acoustics, but only 13 persons attended.” A local farmer explained that the locals preferred fishing.

But slowly the locals were won over – and the rest of Finland followed. A summer school for music students was attached to the festival; in 1993 a 700-seat arts centre was built that is now the principal venue for concerts (though Kuhmo’s Lutheran church and a school hall are also used); and next year for the first time there will be a chamber music competition. All this is a tiny, unpretentious town of 11,000.

We had an afternoon’s sightseeing in Kuhmo and, to be honest, there aren’t many sights to see. The pristine early 19th-century wooden church, a museum housing a tar boat that used to ply its trade on the lakes that criss-cross the region, the local library (of which the town is inordinately proud – “education, education, education” is not just a slogan in Finland but a way of life), and lots of war memorials.

You wouldn’t go to Kuhmo for the non-musical attractions and that’s the point. Once you have flown from Helsinki to Kajaani (the flight takess about an hour) and driven the 100 km east to Kuhmo – the roads are good but beware the elk – you are by yourself in the most wonderful landscape of lake and pine forest. Or rather your companions are the composers around which Kimanen has constructed his festival – this summer, Mozart, Satie and the masters of the romantic piano, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt.

There are up to six concerts a day, few lasting more than an hour. You would be mad to go to them all – though I suspect some hardened festival goers do – but with few alternative activities, other than a healthy morning swim in the lake, a walk through the pines and the obligatory half hour in the sauna (but do say “sow-nah”), you can take in a lot off them and concentrate too.

The festival is resolutely unstarry. All the musicians are paid the same; none is given special privileges; young players get to play with established ones. They come because they enjoy the informality, the atmosphere and the serenity. Some come back year after year, as do many of the audience – even those who fly from the UK. The scent of the pine forest and the quality of the music-making must be addictive.

This year’s festival featured several leading string quartets, including the Endellion and the Danel, and a strong hand of pianists, among them the Bach specialist Angela Hewitt and the brilliant Brazilian Cristina Ortiz, who gave a scintillating performance of Ravel, Schumann and Liszt. This was one concert for which an hour was far too short. There was also a healthy sprinkling of lieder singers, including the charismatic Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, an ensemble from Morocco playing traditional Arab-Andalusian music, and for the first time this year a dance element. It has come a long way from the 13 bemused villagers in the church in 1974.

The town, which is poor by Finnish standards and by no means sophisticated, changes character for the duration of the festival. Restaurants open in barns; local teenagers offer babysitting services, and many of the townspeople move out to their forest chalets (everyone in Finland seems to have a rustic hideaway, a cabin by the lake) and rent their homes to festivalgoers.

Much the best hotel is the Kalevala, which is perched on a ridge overlooking a lake. It is principally a wilderness retreat for winter sports – cross-country skiing, sledging, ice-skating, husky safaris – but for the duration of the festival it adopts a more placid persona. You can still hike, bike, swim and canoe if you faancy, but I didn’t see too many people forgoing their Mozart for outdoor pursuits.

The hotel also has an indoor pool, three saunas and an ice-cold plunge pool – an ideal wake-up call after excessive post-concert drinking (though the locals say never use the sauna to cure a hangover). The downside is that it only has 44 rooms and gets booked up very early for the period of the festival. It may already be too late for 2004 – people were booking for next year as they left – but there’s always 2005.

It was surprisingly hot given the proximity of the Arctic Circle and the mosquitoes are no respecters of music lovers. Lammasjärvi (which apparently means sheep lake) twists for 30km around Kuhmo. Nothing in the town is far from the lake, and accordingly the mosquitoes are everywhere. In December the lake is under six feet of ice, and presumably there’s no need for mosquito repellent, but that’s another story.

Finland is reckoned to have 188,000 lakes. It doesn’t have quite that many classical music festivals, but the number is still remarkable – more than 30 at the last count. This music-mad country of 5 million people also supports 30 orchestras and a dozen conservatoires. It has produced a galaxy of composing and conducting talent in the past two decades – testimony to the Finns’ commitment to “serious” music, but also to the government’s willingness to underwrite music education and performance in the country. Finland’s music used to begin and end with Sibelius, but not any more. Tiny Kuhmo is the symbol of a country that overflows with musical energy.

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