But time can really scamper when you're as busy as Anne keeps herself, and it was some ten years and a second marriage later that she casually mentioned to her husband, Jeff, that she had always felt sad at having had to give up the piano so long ago. It seems Jeff had contacted Merriah Iverson, then teaching at a local music store and now director of Music Magic, a professional music studio just seven miles up Route 3, and arranged to have Anne resume her childhood love. At present there are some 30 symphony orchestras in Finland and many concert instrumentalists and singers.
Opera is tremendously popular.
Reknowned Finnish composers of recent times range from the clarinet virtuoso B. H. Crusell, a contemporary of Beethoven, to the great Jean Sibelius , who died in 1957. It was Sibelius who established a national Finnish style of classical composition and made the whole world familiar with the vivid character of his homeland. The Finnish Americans of the upper midwest keep alive this legacy in many ways. For Anne and Katja, music has been not only a rich source of personal fulfillment but an opportunity to learn and present their native culture. Less than a year after beginning formal lessons they were performing solo and duet arrangements of folk songs in Merriah's studio recitals, held at the local civic center and shopping mall.