Laura Kajander: The Finnish Baroque Orchestra (FiBO) was founded in 1989. From its humble beginnings, it has become a versatile ensemble of freelance musicians, presenting an extraordinarily diverse range of performances every season. A significant growth began around 2010. Since that economic volume has increased more than 10 times as well as the amount of concerts and events every year. Since 2018 FiBO is an orchestra for musicians run by musicians. The artistic leadership of the orchestra is in the hands of the trio, an artistic team that consist of musicians of the orchestra. They are 2 artistic planners and executive manager.

There are many fantastic experiences in playing baroque repertoire, augmenting the repertoire towards classical, early romantic, contemporary or dialogue with baroque and folk or other art fields. There are also such many good experiences in working with great soloists or directors as well as working relying on the orchestra’s own forces. To name one is hard, but one could be Concerto Grosso – Great Play in 2012. It was a huge concert with FiBO musicians, baroque music students, music scholl teachers and their students together. There were about 400 musicians on the stage and it brought huge amount of organisational learning, new partners, new audiences and trust for trying new things in innovative way. These skills and courage have been used later in many other contexts like at the moment in international collaboration between european baroque orchestras and festivals.

Baroque Opera should be done regularly in Finland. That could also tour in other countries. Opera allows many creative solutions and includes collaboration with many art forms. Like former dreams that have lead us to work towards realization, opera is now on the table and sooner or later finds its time and place.

Our 5 years vision consists of always improving working conditions of our musicians and increase touring instead of single concerts. Early Baroque repertoire will have more importance than it used to. We also will collaborate with Young rising talents.

We have many partners and collaborations already now. To create partnerships needs lots of effort but when those collaborations are established the work flow is more natural and we can start collecting fruits in many levels.

There are many fantastic experiences in playing baroque repertoire, augmenting the repertoire towards classical, early romantic, contemporary or dialogue with baroque and folk or other art fields. There are also such many good experiences in working with great soloists or directors as well as working relying on the orchestra’s own forces. To name one is hard, but one could be Concerto Grosso – Great Play in 2012. It was a huge concert with FiBO musicians, baroque music students, music scholl teachers and their students together. There were about 400 musicians on the stage and it brought huge amount of organisational learning, new partners, new audiences and trust for trying new things in innovative way. These skills and courage have been used later in many other contexts like at the moment in international collaboration between european baroque orchestras and festivals.