Santtu-Matias Rouvali

Santtu-Matias Rouvali, born in Lahti in 1985, is one of the most talked-about conductors of his generation, a musician whose electric podium presence and instinctive ear have made him a fixture with the world’s leading orchestras. He grew up in a thoroughly musical household: both parents played in the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, and Rouvali himself trained first as a percussionist before turning, in his early twenties, to conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where he studied in the famous Finnish conducting school of Jorma Panula and worked with Leif Segerstam and Hannu Lintu. That lineage, Finland’s extraordinary production line of conductors, shows in his combination of rhythmic precision and uninhibited physical energy. He served as chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra from 2017 until 2025, an eight-year tenure that drew international attention, and in 2021 became principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. A returning guest with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, he brings to its podium a reputation for fresh, vividly characterised readings of the late-Romantic and twentieth-century repertoire.