LAURI PORRA APPOINTED ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF TURKU MUSIC FESTIVAL AS OF 2025

Photo: Jarmo Katila

The 65th Turku Music Festival, Finland’s oldest continuously running music festival, is held from 5 to 31 August 2024. The Artist-in-Residence in 2024 is Aliisa Neige Barrière, who has designed a set of three concerts for this summer’s Festival. 

As of 2025, composer and musician Lauri Porra will be Artistic Director of the Festival, on an appointment lasting until 2027. The core of the Festival consists of high-quality performances of classical music, but in recent years the offering has been diversified to other musical genres and branches of the arts, and the Festival has actively sought out new partnerships. The Festival proper, held in August each year, features some 30 concerts. 

The Board of the Turku Music Festival Foundation has appointed composer and musician Lauri Porra Artistic Director of the Turku Music Festival. He will begin work on the programme for 2025 immediately. 

“We are pleased and proud to have Lauri Porra as our Artistic Director. We have ambitious plans for which his broad-based experience and expertise are well suited. He understands the potential of the artistic experiences offered by the Festival and a proven track record of delivering on artistic visions in practice. We are excited to be working with him,” says Saara-Sofia Sirén, Chair of the Board of the Turku Music Festival Foundation. 

“Lauri Porra is a highly versatile artist with a wide range of expertise and interests. Classical music and opera are at the core of what we do at the Festival, but we are constantly looking for ways to diversify and to attract as wide a range of culture-aware audiences as possible. Our strategy is to devise repertoire comparable with that of festivals abroad, because we believe in the potential of Turku for cultural tourism. We always seek to offer audiences in Turku and from elsewhere in Finland unique experiences at unique venues, but at the same time we wish to contribute as a cultural tourism operator to the international attractiveness of Turku and the cultural brand of the city. One of the functions of the Festivals is to bring people to Turku and also encourage them to settle here. Our hope is that with the forthcoming Fuuga [music centre], Museum of History and the Future and the 800th anniversary celebrations of the city, Turku will be seen as being on a par with the Nordic capital cities as a destination for cultural tourism. We believe that Lauri Porra is well placed to envision future opportunities with us and to help us build new partnerships,” says Liisa Ketomäki, Managing Director of the Turku Music Festival Foundation. 

“I am honoured to be taking the position of Artistic Director of the Turku Music Festival from 2025. I feel that classical music and music based on classical traditions, which is at the very heart of the Turku Music Festival, is experiencing a sort of revival at this time. New audiences have turned up, and interesting new performers and modes of creativity and performance have emerged in recent years both in Finland and abroad. It has become clear that although these days we are all glued to our smart phones, what we really crave is a sense of community and moments of calm and enrichment, and concerts can deliver on this. The Turku Music Festival will continue to focus on high-quality Finnish and foreign performers. 

“I am also hugely motivated by the Festival because of its location. In recent years, Turku has stepped up as a city that understands the importance of culture as a force for vitality, wellbeing and interest for the entire region. An excellent example of this is the decision to build a new music centre, Fuuga. Turku has a rich and historic tradition of cultural activities, with multiple layers and styles. I look forward to working with all people in Turku to create wonderful, unique experiences in music. I could not imagine a better time to start this inspiring job,” says Lauri Porra. 

In just over a decade, Lauri Porra (b. 1977) has established himself as an internationally successful and acknowledged composer and musician. His solo career to date comprises five albums, released starting in 2005. He has written a wide variety of music for orchestras, films and media, performed by ensembles such as the BBC Concert Orchestra, the London, Seattle, Iceland and Trondheim Symphony Orchestras, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Sinfonia Lahti. Porra draws on his broad-based experience in a variety of musical genres, bridging seemingly wide gaps between styles. He has engaged in cross-discipline collaboration with personalities such as astronomer Esko Valtaoja, vocalist Paula Vesala and rapper Paperi T. He is the Artistic Director of the Unelmien Heinola [Heinola dreams] urban event and was Artistic Advisor to the Helsinki Festival from 2015 to 2019. Porra plays bass guitar with Stratovarius, with whom he has played on four albums and performed in more than 60 countries. In 2016, he became the third Finn ever to be given the NPU Award of the Nordisk Popularauktors Union. In the same year, he was nominated for the HARPA Nordic Film Composers Award. 

Liisa Ketomäki, Managing Director, Turku Music Festival Foundation
liisa.ketomaki@tmj.fi / +358 (0)40 740 6200