Then you’re taking medicine for two or three weeks and hoping it goes away, and it did, but there was a situation where I was playing some shows in Norway with the Chamber Orchestra, and I was taking truckloads of ibuprofen. And it prevented me from playing the violin, because there was nerve pain involved. Then I got a very irritating (though fortunately not permanent) physical symptom, one that often accompanies fatigue and stress. I had been rather tired, I just had a personally tricky year, and in the autumn season, I couldn’t really sleep properly for about a month and a half, or two, it was very sporadic. He wears the same green sweater from his Facebook announcement on today’s call.Īt what point did you realize that calling in sick was going to be your course of action? In November, Kuusisto announced on social media that he was calling in sick for the rest of 2022 after an extremely difficult few years, from a particularly hard stretch during the pandemic, and then losing both his mother and elder brother, Jaakko, in quick succession in 2022.

We got off to a slightly darker start but it’s not all bad.

No, it’s a cool time to be alive if you like questioning the sense in anything. 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. 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. “It’s become a bit more current affairs than we intended,” he says. 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. The regular laughter conceals a lot of anger. He has bright eyes, and a mouth that turns down at the edges. Kuusisto is an intense guy, and though he laughs often, a few dark notes streak through. 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. Pekka Kuusisto and I have turned up to the interview looking vaguely similar.

The happiest refugee online