Urban escapist: Seppo Kimanen, Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival founder

Set Seppo Kimanen rolling on the subject of festivals, and you 're more likely to hear a critique of today's consumer society than a discussion of the relative merits of Beethoven's string quartets. That's a paradox, because after running a chamber music festival at Kuhmo in northern Finland for the past 30 years, the only thing that really interests Kimanen is the music.

"I would question whether big cities can be considered cultural centers any more," says Kimanen (51 ), who spends much of the year touring the world 's musical capitals as cellist of the Sibelius Quartet.

Cities don't offer peace and the kind of rhythm you need to create something valuable. People are stressed because they have to commute in polluted air, they're surrounded by noise, they have no time to think. It's an environment which fosters technically excellent performances, but with a narrow scope of 'soul.' The musical experience is dominated by commercial needs-to sell to large crowds.

That's where Kuhmo comes in: the raison d'etre of the festival Kimanen founded there in 1970 is to escape noise, routine and the television screen, and to encourage participants - listeners as well as performers - to interact with each other.

That process is axiomatic to what Kimanen describes as:

... the search for new ideas, new feelings, a new approach to your own life and what you are. Every great work of art can change you a bit. A festival should optimize the circumstances. There can be no real movement in your head unless you are peaceful. From that peace, you can naturally expect movement of thought and soul.

As anyone who has been there knows, Kuhmo is ideal for the purpose. Set in a landscape of woods and lakes, it looks like the middle of nowhere: There's a crossroads, a marketplace, a beautiful wooden church and little else. It's a day's drive from Helsinki, or you can fly to Kajani, an hour from Kuhmo by road. Every year about 250 musicians make the journey for the two-week festival. From Sunday to Sunday (July 16 through July 30, 2000) there is chamber music from 11 in the morning to 11 at night, with particular emphases this year on Beethoven and leading 20th century composers.

The main recitals take place in Kuhmo's custom-built arts center, a handsome example of modern Finnish architecture, with an atmosphere that encourages you to browse between events. Morning concerts are given in the church, and the school hall is well suited to contemporary music. Kuhmo has a habit of turning visitors into music junkies: You 're reluctant to skip the next recital in case you miss another revelatory interpretation or repertoire discovery. Thanks to Kimanen 's canny programming, each concert has a knack of confounding accumulated preferences and prejudices. The star circus is shunned: Kimanen attracts high-quality musicians, but likes them to break their normal routine, encouraging them to tackle pieces they might not normally do, often in ad hoc ensembles. Many have tried to copy his festival formula, but nowhere else do you get Kuhmo's sense of isolation, its fresh salmon or sauna parties.

Kimanen first visited Kuhmo as a child, when he accompanied his father on land surveys. He remembered it when, as a student, he began casting his eye around for a place where he could make music in summer with like-minded souls. In the spring of 1970 he made a proposal to Kuhmo's music society, which received him sympathetically, and a festival was born.

New Leaps Forward

Today it depends heavily on regional subsidy and 250 local volunteers. But the conditions which attracted Kimanen to Kuhmo in the first place haven't changed.

Kuhmo offers us a background of silence and peacefulness that can be compared to the time of Bach and Mozart. You create music because you have the urge to fill up the silence with sounds. It's an environment which makes you more sensitive to shades and dynamic differences. It's a totally different experience compared to music in big cities.

The festival, and Kimanen's involvement with it, have suffered ups and downs over the years - most notably in 1981, when funds were on the verge of running out. Kimanen had to decide between expansion or contraction, and opted for the former. It was the key to the festival's survival. The inauguration of the arts center in 1993 added a further dimension, improving performance conditions without compromising Kuhmo's essential informality. Now the festival is preparing for another exponential leap: Kimanen is pioneering a chamber music site on the Internet, aimed at sharing Kuhmo's know-how with the world.

What Kimanen calls his. "international digital center of chamber music" will offer advice on how to put together chamber music events, as well as educational programs based on the experience of Kuhmo's summer school for young musicians, and a cybermuseum charting 400 years of chamber music. The center will cost approximately USD $343,000 a year to run. The project has attracted extensive funding from the Finnish government, under its policy of creating jobs in sparsely populated areas; Kimanen is hoping for additional support from Finland's high technology companies.