Starting her career in Finland in 2014 after winning the Turku Cello Competition and became a finalist of the International Tchaikovsky Competition, today Senja Rummukainen becomes one of the brightest cellists of her generation. Praised by critics for her “unbelievable power and intensity”, she performs with the renown orchestras at the most remarkable venues.
2024/2025 season’s highlights include her debuts with the Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Orquesta Filarmonica de Bogotá and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, performance at the BBC Proms with Sakari Oramo, at the Salzburg Easter Festival with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Nowadays, Senja is regularly invited as a soloist by the leading conductors – Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Nicholas Collon, Dima Slobodeniouk, Tarmo Peltokoski, Emilia Hoving – to perform with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Tapiola Sinfonietta, Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
Chamber music is Rummukainen’s another passion. Her revealed ability to be a sensitive partner on a stage, attention to details, careful attitude to music, constant extending of the repertoire and the abilities of the instrument gave her both the reputation of an amazing chamber musician and opportunity to share a stage with Janine Jansen, Ilya Gringolts and Augustin Hadelich and Olli Mustonen.
Teachers have always opened new doors to endless possibilities of music for Rummukainen. She started her studies in the classes of Taru Aarnio. At the Sibelius Academy, under the guidance of Marko Ylönen, she learned to handle large lines and large entities.
In the Class of Truls Mørk at the Norwegian School she found her own personal voice, and with the help of Jens Peter Maintz at the University of the Arts Berlin, another part of Rummukainen’s toolbox was found: the ability to explore the beauty of small details by working with microscopic precision.
Rummukainen aims for her cello to sound as smooth and sweet as she liked it when she first heard it at the East Helsinki Institute of Music at the age of six. Such timbre can express emotions and cause them in others even more precisely than words, because it is the cello that is closest to the human timbre of all instruments.
Rummukainen currently plays a David Tecchler cello from 1707, owned by The Finnish Cultural Foundation.
