Terry Riley, Claire Chase, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and Karen Cargill will take center stage at the opening of the Turku Music Festival in the summer of 2026

Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk

The Turku Music Festival 2026 will begin on August 1, 2026. The festival will open with concerts by Terry Riley & Claire Chase: The Holy Liftoff and Jukka-Pekka Saraste & Karen Cargill: LEAD! Tickets for the first concerts of the 2026 festival will go on sale on Friday, November 28, 2025.

The 2026 Turku Music Festival (TMF) will open on Saturday, August 1. Next year, the festival’s opening will be celebrated with a whole weekend of performances by international and Finnish classical music stars at the Turku City Theatre and Turku Concert Hall. To mark the announcement, all 2026 concerts will be on sale at a special price until Friday, December 5.

Saturday’s concert will bring the European premiere of legendary composer Terry Riley’s The Holy Liftoff to the City Theatre, performed by flutist Claire Chase together with the TMF Quartet. The 90-year-old Riley’s composition takes the listener on an intuitive and imaginative journey of sound; created from hand-drawn musical notation, the work combines minimalist repetition, surreal graphic studies, and contemporary compositional theory.

On Sunday, guests from Fiskars and the LEAD! Foundation will take to the stage of the concert hall when conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill perform together with the Fiskars Festival Orchestra. The evening’s program consists of traditional classical music with a slight twist: Beethoven, Wagner, and Dvořák side by side with a contemporary work by Outi Tarkiainen. The concert will also introduce a young and up-and-coming conductor of the 2026 LEAD! Foundation Finland Master Class. The conductor will be announced in the summer of 2026.

August 8, 2026, at 6 p.m., Turku Concert Hall

The concert will feature works by two notable contemporary composers: Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen (2014) by Icelandic composer Kjartan Sveinsson and Vuori (2025) by Finnish composer Aili Järvelä. Sveinsson’s work combines choir, orchestra, and soundscapes into a dramatic experience, while Järvelä’s work takes the listener on an intimate and impressive journey with harp, percussion, and the soft sounds of chamber music. The orchestra is the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Kaapo Ijas.

August 21, 2026, at 6 p.m., Turku Concert Hall

Sinfonia Lahti visits the Turku Music Festival under the lead of Hannu Lintu. The evening’s program is quintessentially Finnish, consisting of Jean Sibelius’s core works together with Einojuhani Rautavaara’s modernist Angels and Visitations (1978). The concert will culminate in Sibelius’ Finlandia, offering listeners a profound and emotional musical experience in the historic Turku Concert Hall, where TMF will be held for the last time in the summer of 2026.

Mike Valtonen, Acting Sales and Marketing Manager, Turku Music Festival
mike.valtonen@tmj.fi / +358 (0)40 826 8001