BIOGRAPHY

Eero Lehtimäki (b. 1989) made his breakthrough by conducting the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in concert on extremely short notice at Turku Music Festival in 2016. Since then, he has performed with almost all of the Finnish professional symphony orchestras. He started as the artistic director and chief conductor of Joensuu City Orchestra in 2019, and has been the artistic director of the Brinkhall Music Festival since 2018. In 2020, Lehtimäki will start as the artistic director of the Joensuu Winter Music Festival.

Eero started his conducting studies in Jorma Panula’s class for young conductors in 2010 and finished his conducting studies at the Sibelius Academy in spring 2016. He has also studied orchestral and opera conducting in Vienna with Johannes Wildner, Simeon Pironkoff and Konrad Leitner. Eero has attended master classes of Jorma Panula and Valery Gergiev and studied privately with Hannu Lintu.

Before starting his conducting studies, Lehtimäki graduated from the Helsinki Conservatory of Music with clarinet and bass clarinet as main instruments, and he has also studied the historical clarinets in Austria and Germany. He has been the artist in residence clarinetist at Iitti Music Festival annually since 2013 and he is still irregularly performing as soloist and musician with various orchestras and chamber music groups. In addition to his acknowledgements as a musician, Lehtimäki has also graduated as a Master of Science (Technology) in acoustics at the Aalto University. He admires versatile sophistication and makes music to take people to places they could not even imagine.