Britta Byström

Britta Byström has become one of the most performed Nordic composers alive and is enjoying burgeoning relationships with some of the world’s great performers. In 2024, Janine Jansen, Sakari Oramo and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra gave the world premiere of her new violin concerto Shortening Days while orchestras in the USA, Great Britain, Central Europe and beyond continue to take up her orchestral works as they are celebrated around Sweden.

Byström is a composer of distinction whose boundless imagination is tethered by fastidious care. Her work list already contains a number of beguiling orchestral scores and she is known for engaging ensemble, vocal and stage works. Despite its noble beauty, residual melancholy and occasional sparse elegance, her music has a tendency to ensnare both audiences and musicians. Recent albums on Dacapo Records and Alba Classics have disseminated that music even further afield.

Byström was raised in Sundsvall on Sweden’s east coast, starting out as a trainee trumpeter. She was soon drawn to writing music and was lured into the universe of orchestral sound by her hometown’s professional orchestra. ‘I was lucky to be able to hear my music being played professionally from an early age,’ she says. By 18, Byström was a student at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. She graduated with the orchestral work Sera (2002), a seductive journey through assorted landscapes imagined under the light of an Italian evening.  

Sera launched Byström’s career while adumbrating key elements of her voice and method. After a speculative opening, the music grows out of itself, its stern playfulness wheedling thread-like melodies from within - a Byström hallmark. The work hangs as if from above, induced by altitudinous tinkling and a floating violin – an early sign of the composer’s interest in high registers and their luminosity.

By the time of Persuasion (2004), Byström was refining her music’s textures, shaping themes more distinctly and lengthily, and sharpening focus with a minimalistic tendency to spin a work’s entire discourse out from a single entity (shape, chord, theme). That characteristic is felt in the more than twenty works to Byström’s name that form part of her ‘A Walk To…’ series, taking the form of musical strolls that offer glimpses of landscapes, ideas or the works of other composers alongside which some are designed to be played. Many of Byström’s walk-themed works emerged from her close collaboration with violinist and concertmaster Malin Broman.

‘I have a feeling that anything can happen in my works; I don’t always know where the music is going,’ Byström has said. Some tight controls remain, however – clearly defined parameters of tint or texture, narrative or mood. Symphony in Yellow (2003) is a miniature triptych for piano trio that restricts itself to one colour label but wanders free within it. Segelnde Stadt (2014) responds to a single Paul Klee painting, letting subtle rhythmic shimmying coax a thread of melody along. Picnic at Hanging Rock (2010), which won the 2012 Christ Johnson Prize, sought to capture the atmosphere of Peter Weir’s film. Many, Yet One (2016) charts a gravitational pull towards emptiness and back and signifies a notable advance in the composer’s organic structural thinking; it was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, after Byström won the institution’s Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award in 2015.

Voyages extraordinaries (2019) extends the principle of the ‘walk’ with the concept of recurring transformation. The violin concerto Shortening Days (2023) journeys continuously from time-constrained day to time-loosened night and back again. To måner (Two Moons) was written for the Danish National Vocal Ensemble to mark Per Nørgård’s 90th birthday in 2022, and is a deft salute to his Infinity Series and the world of dreams it opens up. The same year Another Part of the Wood, written for the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, occupies a similarly dreamy, magical domain, its title referring to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A chamber opera The Play of the Night (2024), setting of the story of Odysseys and Penelope to a libretto by Peter Bäckström, was first performed in Copenhagen in January 2025. Previous theatre works include the bijoux existential opera If You Lose Your Luggage (2003) and Gállábártnit (2015) for choir, soloists and ensemble, based on a Sámi myth and with a libretto in Sámi by Rawdna Carita Eira (it was first performed in Toronto and nominated for a Canadian Dora award).

Byström has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 2016 and was awarded the Academy’s Järnåkerstipendium in 2024 for her work Alfabet for soprano and septet, based on the Danish writer Inger Christensen’s poem and applying the same principles of the Fibonacci sequence to the music as Christensen does the poem. Byström’s music has been the subject of festivals mounted by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras and in 2021, her work Parallel Universes marked 150 years of the Royal Albert Hall in London at the BBC Proms. She was awarded the inaugural Barbro B Johansson Award by the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund in 2024 and the Swedish Music Publisher’s Award for her Gunnel Wåhlstrand-inspired Octet Ink-wash On Paper (2020).

Andrew Mellor, 2025