Sebastian Fagerlund

Sebastian Fagerlund (born 6 December 1972) is a Finnish composer.

He is described as “a post-modern impressionist whose sound landscapes can be heard as ecstatic nature images which, however, are always inner images, landscapes of the mind”.

Echoes of Western culture, Asian musical traditions, and heavy metal have all been detected in his music.

His output covers a wide variety of genres, ranging from chamber opera to chamber music and works for solo instruments.

The most prominent are his concertos and his works for orchestra.

After a year spent studying in the Netherlands, he applied for the Sibelius Academy to study composition and graduated from the class of Erkki Jokinen in 2004.

He has also attended master classes with Michael Jarrell, Magnus Lindberg, Ivan Fedele and others.

The Clarinet Concerto (2006) marked a turning point in Fagerlund’s career as a composer, and was followed by the tone poem Isola (Island, 2007), another major orchestral work.

Both works were premiered at the Korsholm Music Festival.

His surrealistic chamber opera Döbeln (2009), constructed around hallucinations, won the Record of the Year Award of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) and was a commission from the West Coast Opera Kokkola.

Further works include Ignite (2010) and the violin concerto Darkness in Light, written for Pekka Kuusisto and immensely successful when premiered in Tampere in September 2012.

The concerto was partly inspired by the literature of Haruki Murakami.

Together with clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist, Fagerlund is Artistic Director of the RUSK Chamber Music Festival in Jakobstad, Finland in 2013.

The guitar concerto Transit (2013), commissioned by Yle and premiered by Ismo Eskelinen has continued Fagerlund’s series of concertos.

Fagerlund has said: “A sort of primitivism is present in many of my works.

As a result, rhythm, in particular, has become very important.

I am fascinated by relentless drive and energy.”.

Salient features of Fagerlund’s music are his interest in large-scale forms and details of them, and a view of music as the expresser of fundamental questions and existential experiences.

Works by Fagerlund have been performed around the world by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony and the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.

Fagerlund was the Composer in Residence of the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam for the 2016-17 season and in 2018 was the invited guest composer at the Aspen Music Festival. In the 2021-22 season, Fagerlund was Artist in Residence at the Tapiola Sinfonietta.

Fagerlund was born in Pargas.

He began his musical studies with violin lessons at the Turku Conservatory, where his teacher was Simo Vuoristo.

Fagerlund's 2017 opera Autumn Sonata, with a libretto by the composer and Gunilla Hemming, based on the 1979 film by Ingmar Bergman, was premiered at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki conducted by John Storgårds; Anne Sofie von Otter created the principal role of Charlotte.