Biography
Born in Gothenburg on 16th September 1932. As a schoolboy he received organ lessons from Torsten Holmsten and, later, Gotthard Arnér. He took private lessons from Torsten Sörenson in the early 1950s, later becoming a pupil of Sven-Erik Bäck and Karl-Birger Blomdahl, while outside Sweden his teachers included Wolfgang Fortner, Ernst Krenek and Hanns Jelinek. He studied conducting with Tor Mann and Hans Swarowsky, piano with Carl Tillius, Olof Wibergh and Gottfrid Boon. He was conductor with Riksteatern 1958-1960, Stora Teatern, Gothenburg, 1962-1965, Stockholm Opera 1967-1968 and Örebro Orchestral Foundation 1968-1974. He taught at the Gothenburg College of Speech and Drama 1963-1967, and at its counterpart, now the School of Opera, in Stockholm 1968-1970 and from 1974 onwards. He is a familiar radio broadcaster in programmes on art songs or less-well-known Swedish music. He is also a perceptive music writer, his output includes books about Hugo Alfvén, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, Birger Sjöberg and Swedish symphonies. For a number of years he was Curator of the Music Museum in Stockholm. He is much in demand as an accompanist, for both live productions and recordings. He was a member of the board of the Society of Swedish Composers 1969-1981 and is a Member of the Royal Academy of Music.
Apart from the string quartet with which Lennart Hedwall made his début as a composer in 1950, his youthful output includes several compositions for organ. As a student he played the organ every Sunday at St. Michael’s Chapel, Segeltorp. Since then, organ playing has mostly been a “summer pastime“, although he does give occasional organ recitals. When, in the early 1950s, he got to know Bengt Hambræus and Sven-Eric Johanson, he discovered a new, radical organ style. His Fyra Hymner from 1954, for example, include the first Swedish punctual organ composition. His youthful compositions also include innumerable art songs which at the time were considered both radical and difficult. But he prefers to define “modern“ as “trying to articulate what is within one here and now, and this at the same time necessitates creating a language which feels tenable in all contexts and genres, for both vocal and instrumental, simple and complicated things.“
Read full biography ↓
In recent years too he has written a large number of organ compositions and lieder. “Admittedly, I wonder sometimes why I go on writing lieder in an age which seems to have neither the time nor the interest for the peaceful or intimate aspects of existence.... It still feels like a challenge, trying to invest them with sound and musical form — not a ‘supplementation’ in music but a counterpoint of experience... Romanticism — yes, perhaps, but not escapism!“ During the 1960s, when he led a Baroque group of his own, he wrote a Harpsichord Quintet (1965) in which the trio episodes of the Baroque are interspersed with romantically homophonic sections; the second movement was later re-worked as a Fantasia for organ, while the third became a (much-played) Canzona for strings. The same period generated a good deal of chamber music, including a string trio, a new string quartet (1965) and several works for string orchestra, as well as a cello concerto (1970).
The emigrant opera Amerika, Amerika (1980) and the orchestral piece Sagan (1986), written for the re-opening of Örebro Concert Hall and, like the opera Herr Sleeman kommer, written in 1976-1978, inspired by the authorship of Hjalmar Bergman, occupy a special position in his more recent output and bear witness to a vigorous and fruitful development.
Stig Jacobsson 1987
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.