Lotta Wennäkoski (b. 1970, Helsinki) is one of Finland’s most distinctive contemporary composers, whose music has reached an increasingly wide international audience since the success of Flounce, premiered at the Last Night of the Proms in London in 2017.
She studied at the Budapest Conservatory, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen. After an early focus concert at Musica nova Helsinki, she established herself on the Finnish contemporary music scene with works such as Sakara (2003), Hava (2008) and the flute concerto Soie (2009), later recommended by the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers.
Wennäkoski’s music is often marked by transparent timbres, dreamy glissandos, energy and humour. Gramophone has praised her highly individual orchestration, economy of means and clearly shaped musical goals.
Her catalogue ranges from orchestral and concertante works to chamber music and stage pieces. Notable works include Jong (2013), featuring a juggler with chamber orchestra, the guitar concerto Susurrus (2016), Verdigris (2015), the Proms commission Flounce (2017), Hele for 12 players (2018), and Om fotspår och ljus (2019), written for the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.
Recent highlights include the string quartet Pige, premiered by the Danish String Quartet at Carnegie Hall in 2022, and the violin concerto Prosoidia, premiered in 2023 by Ilya Gringolts and the BBC Symphony Orchestra as a co-commission with the Lahti and Norrlandsoperan Symphony Orchestras.
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra chose Wennäkoski as its spotlight composer for the 2021/22 season and commissioned the harp concerto Sigla, premiered in 2022 by Sivan Magen. The Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Finnish RSO co-commissioned the recorder concerto Vents et Lyres, premiered in Amsterdam in 2025 by Lucie Horsch, and her orchestral work Zelo was premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2026.
Wennäkoski has also written the opera Regine, commissioned by the Savonlinna Opera Festival with a libretto by Laura Krohn Voipio about Regine Olsen, Søren Kierkegaard’s fiancée. Her recordings have received wide acclaim: Ondine’s album including Flounce, Sedecim and Sigla won Gramophone’s 2023 Contemporary Album of the Year, and Avanti! released an album of her smaller-scale works the same year.
Fennica Gehrman Edition
The word “prosody” refers to the musical properties of speech: rhythm, pitch, stress and pauses. So surely music is actually prosody, i.e. speech without the semantic dimension? This fascinating thought was the basic premise for my violin concerto. The title Prosoidia is the original Greek form of the word. The concerto was commissioned jointly by the BBC, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Norrlandsoperan. My warm thanks go to the soloist, Ilya Gringolts, for his collaboration over both the commission and the moulding of the solo part.
I began drafting my concerto in spring 2022, shortly after Russia launched its brutal assault on neighbouring Ukraine. The war made – and still makes – me feel very sad, helpless and frustrated. As the motto for my concerto I chose a pacifist line penned by the Russian Marina Tsvetayeva. As the First World War raged in 1915, she wrote:
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look — it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
What have you to say, O poet, general, lover?
The first movement of the concerto, О чем — поэты, любовники, полководцы? (So what have you to say, O poet, general, lover?) features linguistic performance instructions inspired by prosody, such as parlando (like speaking) and sussurrando (like whispering). The second movement, Word Stress, alludes both to Finnish and to a language, Hungarian, that is a hobby of mine; in both, the stress is always on the first syllable of a word. This movement also affords a glimpse of a folk song arrangement I made, and through it my relationship to the violin, which I briefly studied as a youngster, and specifically in Hungary.
In reflecting on prosody, I was also reminded of a scene from the film Viskningar och rop (Cries & Whispers) directed by Ingmar Bergman. Two sisters begin to speak to each other again after many years’ silence, and the moment is full of charge and consolation. Bergman fades the speech until it is no longer audible and replaces it with the Sarabande movement from Bach’s fifth solo cello suite. The emotional, melancholy third movement of my concerto is in fact called Prosody (BWV 1011 & Bergman), and the listener may well detect echoes of material from Bach’s Sarabande. I have dedicated the movement to the memory of my former teacher Kaija Saariaho, who died in June 2023.
Lotta Wennäkoski
It has been a thrilling chance to write a new concerto for Lucie Horsch, whose musicianship is an incredible combination of virtuosity and deep musicality. I’ve already earlier had the pleasure to compose her two works, the recorder solo Arteria (2021) and Zeng (2018-19) for recorder and ensemble.
The new concerto Vents et lyres has been entirely tailored for Lucie, who is not just playing five different recorders but also singing. The text, La lyre d’Orphée by the French poet Louise Ackermann (1813–90) describes Orpheus’s lyre floating alone along the river after his death. The divine instrument brings a touch of spring to everything it passes by. In fact, I just later realized that the lyre is also a symbol of Concertgebouw, where the premiere is taking place - what a beautiful coincidence! The possibility to write music for the world-famous orchestra has also inspired me greatly during the compositional process.
The concerto has three movements. Since the recorder enjoyed a wide popularity in the Baroque era, the second movement contains distant traces of the harpsichord piece Lyre of Orpheus by Jean- François Dandrieu (1682–1738). In general, the solo part of the concerto has been designed in close collaboration with Lucie – for which I want to thank her warmly.
Lotta Wennäkoski (2025)