Topi Lehtipuu enjoys a reputation as one of Finland’s most highly individual artists. In addition to a career as a tenor of international renown, Topi is Director of the renowned Helsinki Festival, a position he took up in October 2015. He was artistic director of Turku Music Festival from 2010-2015, as well as of Joroinen Music Days, a chamber music festival in eastern Finland.

As a singer, Topi has appeared in concert halls and opera houses throughout the world with conductors like Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Daniel Harding, whilst he collaborates with directors including David Alden, Claus Guth, Christof Loy and Peter Sellars.

He is a frequent guest in Berlin, Glyndebourne, London, Paris, Salzburg and Vienna. Topi also features on numerous recordings, several of them has been Grammy-nominated.

Topi studied piano, violin, choral conducting and singing at the Sibelius Academy. On leaving the Academy, he became a member of the Finnish Radio Chamber Choir, and with his operatic debut singing Albert in Benjamin Britten’s opera Albert Herring with Finnish National Opera his solo career began.

Violinist, conductor and composer Pekka Kuusisto is widely recognised for his artistic freedom and fresh approach to the repertoire. He is Artistic Director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Co-Director of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. He is also an artistic partner of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and has been an ›Artistic Best Friend‹ of the Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen since 2017. Last season, Kuusisto made his debut as a violinist with the Berliner Philharmoniker and as conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. This season he has performed with the Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig, the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, among others.

In addition to being an enthusiastic advocate of contemporary music who regularly premieres new works himself, Pekka Kuusisto is a gifted improviser, collaborating with people from across the artistic spectrum. Unfettered by conventional genre boundaries, his recent projects have included collaborations with composer and pianist Hauschka and percussionist Samuli Kosminen, Dutch neurologist Erik Scherder, electronic music pioneer Brian Crabtree and many more. In 2022, Kuusisto will release his first album as a conductor together with violinist Vilde Frang and the Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen.

Elke Schulze-Höckelmann was national prizewinner in the ›Jugend musiziert‹ competition and a junior student at the University of Music in Münster. She subsequently studied in Cologne and Oslo and played in the European Community Youth Orchestra. But possibly her participation »in the grass-roots democratic grammar school wind orchestra« was the decisive experience that would later lead her to feel most at home with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen.
To find this out, she was previously a member of the Kassel State Theatre Orchestra, the Württemberg Philharmonie Reutlingen and the Philharmonia Hungarica Marl. She has been a soloist with The Deutsche Kammer­philharmonie Bremen since 1993. When she is not playing here, she enjoys playing the historical horn in various ensembles for Early Music.