Kuhmo Chamber Music

Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, founded in 1970 by cellist Seppo Kimanen and fellow students who opened with Telemann performed in Kuhmo Church before an audience of eight hundred, has grown into one of Finland's most significant classical music institutions. By 2013 it presented seventy-two concerts and sold more than thirty-six thousand tickets, built around Kimanen's founding concept of enjoying pure music rather than commercial spectacle.

Cellist Seppo Kimanen and a handful of fellow music students founded what became the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in 1970, an idea Kimanen first floated in a letter dated 13 April of that year to a dentist in the small eastern Finnish town of Kuhmo, proposing that he and a group of young, top-class musicians needed somewhere to hold music courses and stage a chamber music festival over the summer.