Pekka Kuusisto

“…to hear the whispered tenderness that Kuusisto brought to the final simple motif was worth the trip to Perth in itself.” (Rob Adams, The Herald, April 2013)

“The solo was played with bracing intensity and brilliance by the Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto.” (New York Times, February 2012)

“Pekka Kuusisto, a violinist whose rare gift is to become rather than perform the music he plays, made light work of the finely spun figurations that filter through into the dappled orchestral textures...Here and throughout, the playing was marked by the kind of luminous and infectious beauty that comes only from a true marriage of mastery and love.” (The Guardian, February 2012)

“Kuusisto makes an extraordinary sound, delicate and changeable and yet tough as steel wire." (The Telegraph, February 2012)

“The Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, probably the most engaging maverick in classical music today, appeared once to give a startlingly eerie account of Stravinsky’s Airs du rossignol and Marche chinoise, again to supply the piano part in the orchestra’s aptly grotesque romp through the same composer’s Suites Nos 1 and 2 for Small Orchestra; and a third time as a superbly characterful soloist in Adès’s own violin concerto, Concentric Paths.” (The Times, February 2012)

“The young Finn produced some of the most spontaneous and out-of-the-box violin playing and musical interpretation I have heard…what Kuusisto did with it all was fresh and unpredictable. There were no templates, no predictable strategies. At one moment in the Stravinsky he was playing in period style, the next with sweet tone, then with full-on passion, then at the threshold of audibility, and finally barnstorming rambunctiously.” (The Herald, February 2010)

“Lending his wayward genius to all this was the guest solo violinist, Pekka Kuusisto. What an extraordinary sound he makes, tremulous as a reed, often folk-like in its flatness, and yet so expressive.” (The Telegraph, February 2010)

“Other highlights are the gorgeous romancing of the Cantabile, the effortlessly sweet-singing Sonata in A and the heroic Tarantella, originally for violin and orchestra: here Kuusisto really shows his violinistic mettle with some impeccable double-stopped spiccato and frenzied, stratospheric twirling.” (The Strad, February 2010)