Outi Tarkiainen is a Finnish composer born in Rovaniemi, in Finnish Lapland. Her music brings together orchestral colour, the expressive force of the human voice and the physical realities of northern landscapes. After studying at the Sibelius Academy, the University of Miami and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she developed a catalogue spanning orchestral poems, concertos, chamber music, song cycles, jazz orchestra and opera. Arctic ecology, Sámi poetry, womanhood, birth and memory recur in works whose textures move between luminous stillness and concentrated dramatic energy.
Her major scores include Midnight Sun Variations, Songs of the Ice, the cor anglais concerto Milky Ways, The Rapids of Life and the opera A Room of One’s Own, based on Virginia Woolf. These works have been commissioned or performed by ensembles including the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, BBC orchestras, San Francisco Symphony and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Tarkiainen’s practice also draws on earlier work with jazz orchestras, giving rhythm and instrumental colour a structural role rather than treating genre as a boundary.
During the 2025–2026 season she served as composer-in-residence with Joensuu City Orchestra. On 1 October 2026, Songs of the Ice receives its Swedish premiere at Malmö Live with cellist Senja Rummukainen, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra and conductor Emilia Hoving, followed by a second performance on 3 October. Further October performances include Woodland Fanfares in Turku, before the reduced orchestral version of Day Night Day receives its world premiere in Joensuu on 5 November.