© Marco Borggreve

Hailed by the New York Times as “A physically flamboyant player of Olympian virtuosity…”, Kari Kriikku has been a living inspiration behind a great number of remarkable Finnish compositions for the clarinet. On stage and through recordings, he has championed concertos and chamber works written for him by Kimmo Hakola, Jouni Kaipainen, Magnus Lindberg, Uljas Pulkkis, Kaija Saariaho, and Jukka Tiensuu. Above all, Kari Kriikku has premiered the entire output for clarinet by Magnus Lindberg. His recording of the Clarinet Concerto earned him both a Gramophone Award and a BBC Music Magazine Award in 2006. Furthermore he has championed the clarinet works of Jukka Tiensuu. Both concerto works Puro (“brook”, or “Bach” in German) and Missa he has performed more than fifty times.

Kari Kriikku has appeared internationally with the New York Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Orchestre Philhamonique de Radio France, the Vienna Radio Symphony,  Swedish Radio Orchestra, La Scala Orchestra of Milan, the German orchestras of WDR Koln and Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Singapore Symphony, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, Lapland Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain and Amsterdam Sinfonietta. Kari Kriikku has worked with such conductors as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Semyon Bychkov, Alan Gilbert, Vladimir Jurowski, Susanna Mälkki, Andris Nelsons, Sakari Oramo, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, John Storgårds, and Osmo Vänskä. Kari Kriikku He has performed chamber music with Quattour Diotima, the Arditti Quartet, the New Helsinki Quartet, the Avanti! Quartet, the Borodin Quartet, and the Jean Sibelius Quartet, as well as together collaborated with such musicians as Natalia Gutman, Aleksei Lyubimov, and Yuri Bashmet.

His musical inventiveness and fresh attitude towards traditional performance have established for Kari Kriikku a fascinating and versatile career as a soloist and in chamber music. Since the early 1980’s, his membership in the Toimii Ensemble and (as artistic director since 1998) in the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra naturally led him to contemporary music and also to performances that break the bounds of conventional concerts. Kari Kriikku has also performed repertoire of the Classical era and has recorded concertos by Mozart, Weber, Bernhard Henrik Crusell, and Johann Melchior Molter to great international acclaim. In 2009, Kari Kriikku became the was recipient of the prestigious Nordic Music Council Prize.