Tuomas Hannikainen has been amongst the brightest in the extraordinary wave of Finnish conductors since he was appointed Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also held titles as Artistic Director of the Joroinen Festival in Finland, Joint Chief Conductor of the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, Joint Principal Conductor of the Tapiola Sinfonietta, Principal Guest Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of Finland’s period instrument group (now The Finnish Baroque Orchestra).

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In 2010 the famous Jorma Panula asked Tuomas Hannikainen to join him in teaching conducting at the Sibelius Academy and Helsinki Conservatoire.

 

Today he conducts many prestigious orchestras throughout the Nordic countries and beyond, taking him through Europe, Australasia, North America and the Far East with orchestras such as the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, National Orchestra of Spain, BBC Scottish Symphony, Ulster Orchestra, Sydney Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, New Zealand Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Singapore Symphony and Malaysian Philharmonic amongst many others. He has recently enjoyed a successful debut with the orchestra of Welsh National Opera.

 

Tuomas Hannikainen, born Tuomas Ollila in 1965, is the grandson of the famous conductor Tauno Hannikainen. He later changed his name to Hannikainen to honor the name of his mother’s family. He began his musical education at the Porvoo Music Institute before attending the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. He continued his violin studies in France before taking his diploma at the Sibelius Academy in 1988.

 

He started his conducting studies in the legendary conducting class of Professor Jorma Panula, who also taught Esa-Pekka Salonen and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, at the Sibelius Academy, where he graduated with Distinction. After completing his postgraduate studies in St Petersburg with Ilya Musin, he attended Tanglewood in the USA where he worked alongside Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Sir Roger Norrington.

 

His formidable talent is also reflected in the several CD recordings he has made, most of them for the Ondine label under his birth name, Tuomas Ollila, including Sibelius’s Pelleas et Melisande, En Saga, Finlandia and and the complete Karelia Music, which won a Cannes Classical Award.