Dalia Stasevska

Conductor Daliz Stasevska has blazed trails for women in Finland, where she was trained, and in Britain. She is the chief conductor of Finland's Lahti Symphony Orchestra. Stasevska was born on December 30, 1984, in Kyiv, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. Her family moved to Tallinn, Estonia, likewise under Soviet control, and then to Helsinki, Finland, when Stasevska was five. After a year, they moved to the city of Tampere, where Stasevska spent most of her youth. She retained ties to Ukraine and was inducted into the Order of Princess Olga in the III degree by President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2020. Stasevska studied the violin as a child, and at the Tampere Conservatory, she combined violin and composition studies. She continued to study violin and viola at the Sibelius Conservatory in Helsinki. In her twenties, she became strongly interested in conducting, even putting her violin in hock to finance conducting studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, where one of her teachers was the famed pedagogue Jorma Panula. She returned to the Sibelius Academy, where she studied with Leif Segerstam, and earned a diploma in conducting there in 2012. From 2010 to 2015, she served as artistic director of the Kamarikesä chamber music festival in Helsinki. From 2014 to 2016, she was an assistant conductor at the Orchestre de Paris, working under Paavo Järvi. In 2018, Stasevska conducted the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the Nobel Prize award ceremony; she was only the second female conductor to fill that role. That year, she guest-conducted the Opera North Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra; the latter group, on the basis of that single appearance, named her principal guest conductor in 2019. She was the group's first female principal guest conductor and only the second female conductor with a title in the entire BBC musical organization. Stasevska conducted a socially distanced BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night at the Proms in 2020 and made several more appearances at the Proms; her 2022 appearance at the Last Night of the Proms was postponed until 2023 due to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Beginning with the 2021-2022 season, Stasevska became the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. She made her debut recording with that group in 2023, backing pianist Olli Mustonen in performances of concertos by Einojuhani Rautavaara and Bohuslav Martinu on the BIS label. She is married to rock musician Lauri Porra, the great-grandson of Jean Sibelius.