The Kymi Sinfonietta is a newcomer on the Finnish orchestral scene, playing its first notes together on January 1, 1999. The new Sinfonietta has 30 regular players. It does, however, have a long tradition in that it consists of musicians from the Kotka and Kouvola City Orchestras disbanded at the end of 1998. It is maintained by an association owned by the two towns. By pooling their resources at a time when the future of both orchestras hung in the balance, the towns have succeeded in creating a highly competent Sinfonietta. The Kymi Sinfonietta is unusual in Finland in that in addition to being jointly owned by two towns it is a limited company.

The orchestra’s first Artistic Director, Juha Nikkola, quickly succeeded in welding the players in the Kymi Sinfonietta into a homogeneous unit. As Principal Guest Conductor 2004-2006 Dmitri Slobodeniouk added new nuances to the orchestra’s repertoire. Since the beginning of 2007 the artistic direction has been in the hands of the charismatic Yasuo Shinozaki, a conductor who has built up an international career with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, in Asia, Britain and elsewhere.

Yasuo Shinozaki

Concerts by the Kymi Sinfonietta are held at Kotka Concert Hall on Wednesdays and Kouvola Town Hall on Thursdays. The quality of the sound has been further enhanced by the fact that each of the concerts given in Kotka is repeated the following day in Kouvola. In other words, the orchestra has an opportunity to give each concert twice and thereby polish its performance.

The orchestra has also won acclaim outside its home province, as on its first foreign tour, to St. Petersburg, in spring 2003. In September 2004 the Kymi Sinfonietta aroused national and international admiration as the orchestra premiering the five finals works in the I International Uuno Klami Composition Competition. These concerts were broadcast to 13 countries.

The Kymi Sinfonietta has a very broad repertoire ranging from small chamber works to large symphonies, occasionally joining forces with other orchestras for the performance of the latter. It released its first, critically-acclaimed disc Klami Rhapsodie on the Alba label in 2002. One of the items on this disc was the world premiere recording of Uuno Klami’s incidental music to the play The Prodigal Son. This was followed in 2004 by a second disc, the opera The Journey by Jukka Linkola based on texts by Toivo Pekkanen. The most recent disc KymiScenes was released in December 2007.