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Johan Ullén, composer: biography
Johan Ullén was born Stockholm, Sweden. He studied piano and composition at the Royal
Academy of Music and at the Sibelius-Academy in Helsinki, Finland.
Johan, in his capacity as a pianist, has performed with the majority of Sweden’s orchestras, and has
toured in Europe, the USA and South America. In 2000, he was appointed Swedish Radio’s artist in
residence, a post which led to a large number of recordings and live broadcasts, heard throughout
Europe.
As a composer, Johan has written chamber music, orchestral music, songs and operas, which have
been performed both in Sweden and internationally in concert houses and at festivals.
The Deadly Sins, a suite of seven tangos for piano trio, has been performed around forty times by
different ensembles in Sweden, Norway, Italy, Russia, Japan and elsewhere, and has been broadcast
by Swedish Radio. Johan has made extensive use of the tango style, and was notably commissioned
to write a tango-influenced piano concerto, premiered by Musica Vitae with Johan himself at the
piano.
In 2009, Swedish Radio commissioned the song cycle Lady Macbeth for mezzo-soprano Katarina
Karnéus, who, with pianist Matti Hirvonen, gave the premiere at Folkoperan in Stockholm as part
of the Swedish Sopranos recital series. The same year, Johan was appointed festival composer at
Strängnäs Summer Music, where his commissioned work for cello and piano, To Be, was
premiered.
The clarinet concerto Night Awake was premiered by Kristian Möller and KammarensembleN in
2010. In the same year, Uppsala University commissioned the orchestral work Amygdala, which
has since been performed in Sweden, Italy and Spain.
In 2011, Johan was appointed composer in residence at the Chamber Music Festival in Linköping,
Sweden, during which many of his works were performed. The festival also commissioned and
premiered his piece for clarinet and string quartet, Dream of Sorrow.
Uppsala Chamber Soloists commissioned the piece Libertine for string sextet, which they premiered
in 2012, and have gone on to perform extensively. The same year, After the End of Time, a coproduction with fellow composer Jonas Bohlin, was premiered in the Grunewald Hall in Stockholm.
An international radio version of this work was produced in 2013.
Since its composition in 2012, Johan’s work for electrical duo ‘essens:1’, [train.rain.loops], has
been performed around thirty times.
In October 2013, a new, longer and expanded version of Lady Macbeth, now for mezzo-soprano
and orchestra, was commissioned and premiered by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, again with
soloist Katarina Karnéus.
Later the same year, Swedish Television broadcast The Deadly Sins, performed by Trio Nova,
joined by Swedish Academy member Kristina Lugn, interposing her sin-inspired texts between the
tangos.