Young City

Today Espoo is known as a high-tech city with many technology companies. Espoo has also a lot to offer in culture visual arts, theatre, literature and music. The world famous Tapiola Choir started more than 30 years ago as a school choir in Tapiola garden city. The city of Espoo is a member of the Helsinki Year of Culture 2000 organisation.

It is a music city with outstanding choirs. Music education is a background for cultural life. The biggest music event in this year, the fourth Choral Espoo Festival is held from 2 to 10 December 2000. The festival programme offers many outstanding ensembles of the international choir world from The Hilliard Ensemble to Prague Chamber Choir, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and others, of course also Tapiola Choir. In addition, the festival offers several courses, lectures and demos.

The annual Espoo April Jazz Festival is hosted by the Espoo Big Band and is the most significant jazz event in the Helsinki area. The city orchestra of Espoo, the Tapiola Sinfonietta, is also an established part of the musical life of the Helsinki metropolitan area. The orchestra is built as a typical Viennese classical orchestra, and it is one of the finest chamber orchestras in the Nordic Countries thanks to its individual approach, its high musical quality and its interesting concepts.

In the field of visual arts Espoo is known as the home of Gallery Otso, an excellent forum for contemporary art and media art. The Espoo school of visual arts offers education in painting, drawing, sculpture, graphics etc. for more than 1200 children and young people. The Akseli Gallen-Kallela Museum arranges changing exhibitions in the former studio-home of one of Finland's bestknown artist.

The children's theatres represent one important feature of the young profile of the culture. One of the two main theatres for children is Teatteri Hevosenkenkä, which has performances in Finnish but also in several immigrant languages. The other, Unga Teatern, plays mostly in Swedish, sometimes also in Finnish. For adult population the Espoo City Theatre offers classical programme like Shakespeare as well as new Finnish and international programmes.

The increasing population rates in Espoo guarantee busy times for all those working with culture, but also the glad feelings of experiencing the importance of the culture for new and old inhabitants of the city.