Profile | Meet the Filipino-Finnish conductor who will lead HK Phil: the opera that inspired him, his mentor, and why one work is a must-perform in Hong Kong
- Tarmo Peltokoski, 23, decided it would be his life’s mission to conduct after watching a two-minute YouTube clip featuring the ending of Wagner’s Siegfried
- He says he had to add Sibelius’ Finlandia to the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s 2022/23 season finale programme to balance the works by Russian composers
A whole lifetime is sometimes not long enough to find one’s calling. But for Tarmo Peltokoski, the 23-year-old Filipino-Finnish conductor who will lead the Hong Kong Philharmonic in its 2022/23 season finale, the moment of epiphany came when he was just 11.
“After playing the piano for three years, I discovered Wagner through a two-minute YouTube clip. It was the ending of Siegfried. At that moment I decided that it would be my life’s mission, so to say, to conduct,” he tells the Post.
In a mere 12 years since he watched that video, he will conduct the same Wagner piece for the second time, in Latvia in July.
He first conducted it in 2022, part of his first full “Ring Cycle” – a group of four individual operas composed by Wagner that includes Siegfried – a feat he achieved at the Eurajoki Bel Canto Festival in Finland.
Peltokoski credits Finland’s music infrastructure for his early success, and in particular his mentor Jorma Panula, a central figure in Finnish conducting who has trained a myriad of highly acclaimed Finnish conductors.