Heini Kärkkäinen

Picture: Heikki Tuuli

Heini Kärkkäinen studied the piano with Dmitri Hintze and subsequently with Liisa Pohjola at the Sibelius Academy and with Ralf Gothóni, Jacques Rouvier and others. She has appeared widely in Europe and the United States and in chamber music with such partners as Ana Chumachenko, Robert Cohen, Bruno Giuranna, Massimo Quarta, Pekka Kuusisto and Jean-Jacques Kantorow. A versatile musician with an open-minded attitude to contemporary music, she has premiered many chamber and orchestral works. These have included Mikko Heiniö’s Piano Quintet with the New Helsinki Quartet, and the Piano Concerto by Olli Koskelin with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jukka-Pekka Saraste in 1994. Heini Kärkkäinen has recorded on the Ondine label. A duo disc with violinist Pekka Kuusisto recorded at Sibelius’s home, Ainola, was released in 2004, and her disc of music by Saint-Saëns in spring 2007 was chosen as Record of the Month by the BBC Music Magazine in March and featured on Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice list in April.