Pekka Kuusisto and I have turned up to the interview looking vaguely similar. Two pairs of glasses, lots of short, dark-blond hair, and two not dissimilar jumpers meet on the screen: mine, a sludge-green skiing fleece borrowed from my dad; his, a bottle-green Icelandic-knit sweater made by his mother-in-law during lockdown. Kuusisto is an intense guy, and though he laughs often, a few dark notes streak through. He has bright eyes, and a mouth that turns down at the edges.
The regular laughter conceals a lot of anger. On the afternoon that we speak, the violinist and conductor is due to travel to Norway for a concert with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and the Sámi singer Katarina Barruk. “It’s become a bit more current affairs than we intended,” he says. The Finnish government’s treatment of the Sámi people has been condemned by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination; with the recent elections in Finland ejecting center-left prime minister Sanna Marin, and the country moving steadily towards the right, according to Kuusisto, the already slim prospects of change have decreased even further. In the first few minutes of our conversation, he flashes through a range of political subjects: the treatment of the Sámi, Greenpeace, Just Stop Oil, his frustration that there’s not a Finnish equivalent of the UK pressure group Led By Donkeys. There’s clearly a lot on his mind.
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