Tuomas Ollila-Hannikainen - Conductor
Tuomas Ollila-Hannikainen is currently Artistic Director of Finland's period instrument orchestra, The Sixth Floor Orchestra. He has been amongst the brightest prospects in the extraordinary wave of younger Finnish conductors since being appointed Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra in 1994. He has also held positions as Joint Principal Conductor of the Tapiola Sinfonietta in Finland and as Principal Guest Conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Today he regularly conducts many of the most prestigious orchestras throughout the Nordic countries. Elsewhere his work has taken him to Europe, Australasia, N. America and the Far East with orchestras like 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. His formidable talent is also reflected in the several CD recordings he has made, most of them for the Ondine label.
Tuomas Ollila-Hannikainen was born in 1965. 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 began his conducting studies in 1985 in the famous class of Professor Jorma Panula, who also taught Esa-Pekka Salonen and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, at the Sibelius Academy, graduating with Distinction in 1991. In 1993, after completing his postgraduate studies in St Petersburg with Ilya Musin, he attended Tanglewood in the USA where he studied with Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Sir Roger Norrington.
November 2006