Flyygelikuu: Iivari Aalto

Pianist Iivari Aalto recently graduated from the Sibelius Academy at the University of the Arts (autumn 2025). His teachers have been Kirill Kozlovski and professor Tuija Hakkila. He works as a freelance musician in Helsinki and teaches piano at the Helsinki Conservatory.

During his studies, Aalto has also specialized in harpsichord and fortepiano at the early music department. He has performed contemporary music with ensembles including NYKY-Ensemble and Uusinta Ensemble. As a repetiteur and orchestra pianist, he has worked for the Finnish National Theatre, RSO, HKO, OperaBox, and Opera Skaala. He has performed throughout the Nordic countries, all Baltic states, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. He has won numerous prizes, including first prize in the Juvenalia chamber music competition 2017 (four-hand), the Helmi-Vesa piano competitions 2019 and 2023, and a special award as a finalist in the Tampere piano competition 2025 (for the best performance of a work composed before 1829). Aalto is also a founder and artistic director of the RADALLA festival in Espoo, working alongside his brother Artturi Aalto. His studies have been supported by Pro Musica, the Martin Wegelius Memorial Foundation, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

The concert programme is built around music by two Polish composers, Frédéric Chopin and Grażyna Bacewicz. The unifying theme is the relationship between music and dance: the brightness of Chopin's Barcarolle and the lightness of Bacewicz's Children's suite create a luminous dance world, while the second half of the concert - Chopin's Polonaise and Bacewicz's second piano sonata - paint a darker, almost revolutionary image of the symbiosis between dance and music.