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, including the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Tampere Filharmonia, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra, and Tapiola Sinfonietta. He worked as the artistic director and chief conductor of Joensuu City Orchestra from 2019 to 2022.

Eero started his conducting studies with 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, Germany, and France. He has been an Iitti Music Festival artist 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.