Biography
Erik Nordgren, born on february the 13th in Sireköpinge, Sweden was a composer and conductor, renowned for his frequent collaborations with great film directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Alf Kjellin, Gustav Molander and Jan Troell.
He studied the violin, conducting and composition at the Stockholm Royal Academy of Music, and qualified as a teacher in 1941.
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Four years later he became the recording consultant at Swedish EMI/HMV in Stockholm, and from 1952 through 1967 he was the music director at SF. ("Svensk Filmindustri")
From then on until 1976, he was responsible for the orchestra section of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation.
In addition to his aforementioned work in the regions of film, he also composed several concertos for bassoon and clarinet.
But there is no doubt that his scores for the films of auteur Ingmar Bergman is the composers most popular and admired work.
Out of the seventeen scores he wrote for the director, Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal and Secrets of Women are very likely the best realized.
You can easily draw parallels between the Bergman/Nordgren team-up and those consisting of Eisenstein and Prokofiev, Fellini and Rota, Cocteau and Auric, and Hitchcock and Herrmann.
It was a cooperation founded in their mutual friendship, and in Nordgren's understanding of the necessity of the occasional compromise that comes with being a film composer.
Their collaboration finally came to an end as Bergman got involved with opera as an assistant director, an experience which completely altered his conception of music in his films.
From that point on, he mostly scored his films with instrumental pieces by Mozart, Bach and Chopin.
The score for "The Pleasure Garden" in 1961 was the last original score that Nordgren composed for the director.
Erik Nordgren died on the 6th of March 1992, in Stockholm, Sweden.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.