Inside Tarmo Peltokoski’s First Season Leading HK Phil

When, just over two years ago, Tarmo Peltokoski was named as the next music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (HK Phil), many music lovers in the city were left scratching their heads. Who was this (then) 24-year-old upstart, anyway? The orchestra leaned into this spirit of discovery, titling its transitional 2025/26 season “Find Out!” and encouraging listeners to apply their ears and make up their own (preferably open) minds. The three programmes the Finnish protégé conducted during his handover season as music director designate should have won over any sceptics — the only thing more sonically consuming than his Shostakovich Symphony no. 11 in April 2026 was last month’s staggeringly epic season-closer, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony.

In person, Peltokoski is a practical man with little interest in mythologising his relationship with the city or its orchestra. He had visited Hong Kong just once before taking the job, and the most remarkable thing he’s discovered so far is that his preferred brand of Finnish blueberry juice is available in his local supermarket. Otherwise, things are strictly business. Sorry, art: his sole motivation for signing the four-year contract was “the level of the orchestra,” he says twice when pressed on the matter by Zolima CityMag in April, a week after his 26th birthday. “I happened to get an offer, and yeah, it is objectively a very important and interesting place,” he adds unromantically. “I can’t say that I’ve explored it at all, really.”

The subtle takeaway might be that the city has more to gain from the union than Peltokoski, the orchestra having bagged a rising star at a critical moment before he broke through into classical music’s stratosphere: “If we had waited even a few more months, it would have been too late,” HK Phil’s director of artistic planning Timothy Tsukamoto notably told me this time last year. After all, Tarmo was already on a first-name basis with the classical establishment after being named the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen’s first principal guest conductor, aged 21. Later in 2022, he was also named principal guest conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and music and artistic director of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. He retains the Bremen and Rotterdam roles and became conductor laureate in Riga after his three-year term ended in 2025.

He may be a busy man, but Peltokoski’s fingers appear all over HK Phil’s coming season, his first as music director. Following increasingly unsubtle overtures to more mainstream audiences — with Disney soundtracks and video-game-themed symphonies — the 2026/27 programming feels both brawnier and brainier than that of recent seasons, with a heavy dose of Austro-German romanticism. Ironic, perhaps, that Peltokoski takes over from 65-year-old Jaap van Zweden, a no-nonsense personality known for symphonic tradition above all else. “We’re the Hong Kong Philharmonic. This is a great orchestra and its function is to play real music,” says Peltokoski matter-of-factly, with the gravitas of conviction and the uncorrupted zeal of youth — and a decisive say in each of the season’s 35 orchestral programmes.

What to expect 

While fads and gimmicks may be in shorter supply, HK Phil’s 53rd season since turning pro is not cutting any corners when it comes to star power. Among the international soloists enticed to town are some of the biggest names in the business: cello superstar Yo-Yo Ma and opera heartthrob Juan Diego Flórez, as well as violin virtuosos Augustin Hadelich and James Ehnes. Tarmo’s podium, meanwhile, will welcome guest conductors Manfred Honeck, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Gustavo Dudamel — fresh from conducting “Seven Nation Army” at the recent FIFA World Cup final halftime show, no less.

However, greater scrutiny — and likely attention — will meet the six main programmes Peltokoski himself conducts, which collectively amount to nothing less than a manifesto: two mighty Mahler epics, a pair of Bruckner symphonies, more Vaughan Williams, and even the spotlight of the annual outdoor Symphony Under the Stars.

While the first performances take place in late August — before the official season opening sees Honeck conduct Beethoven and Strauss on 16–17 September — Tarmo himself won’t be in town until cooler climes arrive. After all, as well as his aforementioned roles in Bremen, Riga and Rotterdam, HK Phil must share its star with his concurrent full-time gig with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse — where Peltokoski’s contract as music director runs until August 2029, a year before his final confirmed season in Hong Kong.

The industrious conductor will maximise his next visit to the city — the seventh of his life — with five concerts in just 12 days, making his entrance felt with a history-making performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on 7–8 November. “Mahler’s 8th has never before been played by the Hong Kong Phil — and it’s about time,” Peltokoski told the musicians, management and journalists gathered at April’s season announcement. “It is one of the great human statements of the 20th century. I thought this is the only possible way to open — with a big bang. There’s nothing like it. It makes an effect beyond imagination. It’s an unforgettable experience. Or at least I hope it will be.”

Despite running for more than 80 minutes, the symphony consists of just two movements in two languages: a short-ish Latin setting of the Pentecostal hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, giving way to the hour-long second movement, based on the German text of the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two. Nicknamed the “Symphony of a Thousand,” one of the composer’s most ambitious works is rarely performed because of the huge cast it requires — including eight vocal soloists and, in Hong Kong, three choirs: the London Philharmonic Choir, The Hong Kong Children’s Choir and the orchestra’s own Hong Kong Philharmonic Chorus. “We’ll not quite have a thousand people on stage, but we try to get as close to that as possible,” quips Tarmo.

Amid the mass of humanity, it might be a challenge to discern if first violin Jing Wang is on stage. The concertmaster’s 13-year term with the orchestra ends abruptly at the end of November, following reported ideological clashes with its new leader, but Wang was notably absent from last month’s season closer. 

Under the stars

While in town, Peltokoski will also conduct HK Phil’s annual al fresco crowd-pleaser Symphony Under the Stars at the New Central Harbourfront on 13 November. While the full programme is usually announced closer to the date, Tarmo promises at least one sure-fire celestially themed hit — the theme from Star Wars.

Four days later, he’ll be back onstage at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on 17–18 November to present Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 with German pianist Martin Helmchen. The concerto shares the bill with Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. “I think Bruckner fits the orchestra very well,” says Peltokoski. “I have long-term ambitions concerning the orchestra and Bruckner, that I can’t admit right away — I hope you like it — because you’re going to be hearing more.”

Indeed, two months later he’ll be back in Hong Kong to conduct Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony for the first time in his life. Sharing the programme on 14–15 January will be Asmik Grigorian, performing Strauss’ serene Four Last Songs for her Hong Kong debut. The Lithuanian opera star ranks as “one of the greatest sopranos of our time,” according to Tarmo. “She can literally sing anything.”

Peltokoski will present the same programme in Guangzhou a day later, before returning to Hong Kong later in the season for two unmissable bills. His next engagement is a particularly personal affair, welcoming compatriot Senja Rummukainen to perform Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto, a daring modern piece littered with electronics that Peltokoski’s mentor originally penned for Yo-Yo Ma. The 26–27 March programme then draws a direct through-line back to last season’s finale, with a reading of Vaughan Williams’ fierce Fourth Symphony, a dramatically charged work composed in the years before the Second World War. “We mostly know Williams as a pastoral English composer of very beautiful, easy-listening tunes that grandmas hear on the BBC when they put on their afternoon tea,” says Tarmo, who is rumoured to be working towards a complete recorded cycle of Vaughan Williams’ nine symphonies between Hong Kong and Toulouse. “But the fourth symphony is something entirely different. It’s terribly violent, brutal, horrifying, dissonant… and I love it.”

While the HK Phil’s season runs until mid-July, its leader bows out early, going out with an appropriately seismic bang a week later, on 2–3 April, with a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony – another monolithic, 80-plus-minute work last memorably performed by the orchestra under Tarmo’s predecessor, Jaap van Zweden, in May 2019. Tarmo owns the challenge, declaring The Resurrection his favourite symphony.

“For some people it’s Beethoven Nine – that’s also an acceptable answer. For me, it’s Mahler Two – The Resurrection contains everything about life and death, good and bad, everything underneath and above the sun,” enthuses Peltokoski. “If there’s anything greater than Mahler Eight, it’s Mahler Two.”

Wagner: on the record

Tarmo’s final two mainstage programmes of the season both open with operatic preludes by Richard Wagner — Lohengrin for the former and Tristan und Isolde for the latter. Between them, the orchestra has enlisted its leader for two free, 50-minute community concerts on 28 March, reprising the Star Wars theme alongside the same Wagner preludes. 

More, even, than Mahler, the controversial German composer of outlandish opera epics will forever be intertwined with Peltokoski’s own myth. The HK Phil has gained tremendously from this association, recently celebrating the vinyl release of its debut album on Deutsche Grammophon, thanks to Peltokoski’s exclusive contract with the world’s premier classical label. “Of all the composers worldwide, always, for everyone, Wagner has the most cult following,” says the conductor. “He also gets the most hate, specifically. So I think that’s enough proof that he really does stand out for everyone — and that’s just the general suggestive nature of his work.”

Anyone lucky enough to be seated in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall on 28 June 2025 will remember the physical thrill of hearing Peltokoski conduct HK Phil’s heroic performance of Wagner’s The Ring – An Orchestral Adventure — a sweeping, 68-minute non-stop suite distilled from the roughly 15-hour opera cycle in 1991 by Henk de Vlieger. The resulting release captures much of the heft, nuance and precision of the performance; more than anything, this magnificent document offers a clear indication of both the inspiration and attention Peltokoski has brought the orchestra.

The recording is just the latest chapter in the conductor’s ongoing obsession. He completed his first Ring cycle aged 22, fulfilling a childhood dream dating back a decade to his earliest encounter with Wagner’s music. His boyish mind was easily sucked into the cycle’s outlandish fantasy universe of myths and dragons, which he compares to the populist appeal of Star Wars, The Hobbit and Game of Thrones.

“I had a very limited understanding and knowledge of music as a whole – obviously, as an 11-year-old – but somehow, when hearing Wagner for the first time, I just had a very instinctive gut feeling that this must be the greatest music in the world,” he recalls. “But I’ve spent my life basically trying to get to know as much music as possible – and I must still say, Wagner is still the best there is.

“Somehow that [childhood] instinct was right. And it doesn’t make me unique in any way. It makes me exactly like everyone else.”

Tickets for HK Phil’s 2026/27 season go on general public sale on 6 August. The orchestra’s recording of The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure (arr. Henk de Vlieger) for DG is available digitally, and on CD and vinyl.