Magnus Lindberg is a Finnish composer and pianist known for his virtuosic and accessible concertos, chamber music, and orchestral works. His style utilizes several contemporary elements such as spectralism, electronics, serialism, and the high-energy sounds of punk rock music. He was born in Helsinki, in 1958, and he began learning the accordion when he was very young. While still a child, he was a student at Lasse Phlajamaa’s accordion school, and he also received trumpet lessons from Lauri Ojala. He performed in a brass band led by Barbro Bergqvist at the Normlyceet school, and he started studying the piano when he was 11 years old. He became a student at the Sibelius Academy around 1973, where his instructors included Risto Väisänen, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Paavo Heininen, and Osmo Lindeman. He also attended summer courses with Franco Donatoni in Siena, and with Brian Ferneyhough in Darmstadt. He composed some of his earliest works around this time, such as Arabesques, Quintetto Dell’estate, and several pieces for piano. With classmates Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lindberg founded the Toimii Ensemble which served as a type of laboratory for exploring his compositional ideas. The group premiered many pieces by Lindberg and several other composers. After his graduation from the Sibelius Academy in 1981, he continued his studies in Paris with Vinko Saariaho and Gérard Grisey, and he performed throughout Europe with Toimii and as a solo recitalist. While travelling in Berlin, he became acquainted with punk rock music and Japanese Taiko drumming, which both made a lasting impression on his style as a composer. He established his reputation in 1982 after his Sculpture II was premiered by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Toimii’s premieres of Action-Situation-Signification and Tendenza also attracted attention. He completed Kraft for chamber ensemble, orchestra, and electronics in 1985, and it was premiered by Toimii and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra that September. This powerful, large-scale work earned the Nordic Council Music Prize, and Lindberg also won the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers for the second time in 1986. From then until 1988, he took a break from composing so he could reshape his style and focus on his health. He returned to composing with an orchestral trilogy that included Kinetics, Marea, and Joy. With a renewed compositional vision, Lindberg became more concerned with harmony, timbre, and color, with less of a focus on the ornamentation and cacophonous sonorities found in earlier works. This evolved into a more focused and pure sound which can be heard in Aura, Arena, Feria, and Fresco. Additionally, he taught summer courses Darmstadt, Finland, and he also served as a composition professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and the Britten Pears School in Aldeburgh. He was honored with several awards in the 2000s including the European Composer Prize of the City of Berlin in 2000, the 2003 Wihuri Internation Sibelius Prize, and the BBC Music Magazin Award in 2006. He joined the Akademie der Künste, Berlin in 2001, The Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 2003, and the Académie Royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts in 2007. Lindberg held composer residencies with the New York Philharmonic from 2009 to 2012, the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra from 2011 to 2012, the London Philharmonic from 2014 to 2017, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France for the 2016 season. Since 2020, his Piano Concerto No. 3 was premiered in 2022 by Yuja Wang with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the 2024 Viola Concerto also received its premiere by Lawrence Power with Nicholas Collon and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Lindberg remains very active, and his music can be heard on Magnus Lindberg: Aura; Marea; Related Rocks, Magnus Lindberg: Complete Works for Accordion, and Magnus Lindberg: Viola Concerto, Absence & Serenades. ~ RJ Lambert, Rovi

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Magnus Lindberg

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