Karelia (Complete incidental music); Press Celebrations Music

Cannes Classical Award 1999

"Sibelius presented with unshakeable confidence. Outstanding - one of the glories of the catalogue. No Sibelian should be without this disc"
- MusicWeb Feb 2005

Conductor Tuomas Ollila (b. 1965) began his career as a violinist and completed his diploma examination at the Sibelius Academy in 1988. He studied conducting in Professor Jorma Panula's conducting class and received his conducting diploma in 1991. He has studied further with Professor I.A. Musin at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1990-92 and with Seiji Ozawa, Simon Rattle and Roger Norrington at Tanglewood in summer 1993. In April 1996, he participated in Pierre Boulez's contemporary music masterclass in Paris, with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Ensemble InterContemporain as resident orchestras.

Tuomas Ollila has conducted nearly all orchestras in Scandinavia. In 1997, he made a successful début in Australia, and he has been appearing there regularly with a number of orchestras. In 2000, he was invited to conduct the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Wales Symphony Orchestra in Britain. He regularly appears in Britain and in Central Europe. From 1994 to 1998, Tuomas Ollila was chief conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra. After a sabbatical year, he was engaged as regular conductor of the Tapiola Sinfonietta alongside French conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow from autumn 1999 to summer 2001. In January 2001, he was appointed principal guest conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra in Perth.