Benjamin Staern belongs to the most performed and distinctive composer profiles of his generation in Scandinavia. With the symphonic work The Threat of War, he made a name for himself already during his studies. He has subsequently developed several branches in his music-making; large-scale orchestral works, music drama and chamber music. His music is deeply personal and characterized by a strong sense of timbre. As he is a synesthet, tones and sounds appear in specific colours to him.
Benjamin Staern (b. 1978) began his musical career with studies in cello, piano and percussion. He studied musicology at Lund University and between 1998-2005 composition at the Academy of Music in Malmö for Rolf Martinsson, Hans Gefors and Luca Francesconi. He made an early breakthrough during his studies with the symphonic workThe Threat of War (1999).
Since then, Staern has developed a deeply personal style and a repertoire that includes orchestral and chamber music, music drama, solo works and electroacoustic music. An interesting aspect of Staern as a composer is his unusual ability to associate tones and timbres with different colors and shades. This is a variant of the phenomenon of synesthesia, and is fundamental to how he perceives and creates music.
Among his works, you find the much performed concert opening piece Jubilate composed for the Gothenburg Symphony in 2009, Godai – Concerto for Orchestra (2013) for the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Songs about Dazzlingly White Love(2013) for alto Anna Larsson and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, and his first symphony, Polar Vortex (2014) premiered by Leif Segerstam and the Gävle SO.
The clarinet concerto Worried Souls from 2011, composed for Karin Dornbusch and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, attracted great attention and was awarded Sweden's foremost composer award, The Major Christ Johnson Prize.
2010-14 Staern was composer-in-residence with the New European Ensemble in The Hague, for whom he wrote works such as Tranströmer songs and the chamber symphony Bells and Waves, winner of the Swedish MPA Award 2011, as well as the multimedia work SAIYAH.
In the summer of 2016, Benjamin Staern was " the composer profile" at the Båstad Chamber Music Festival, which included the premiere of Air-Spiral-Light, a concerto for guitar and chamber ensemble with Jacob Kellermann as soloist.
December 2016 saw the premiere of Benjamin Staern's first opera The Snow Queen, to a libretto by Anelia Kadieva Jonsson after HC Andersen's fairy tale, at the Malmö Opera. It was a huge success and it has since been staged at Theater Vorpommern in Stralsund, Germany, and at the Swedish Royal Opera in Stockholm.
The chamber opera Hilma, about the life and creation of the artist Hilma af Klint, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and was subsequently staged at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In April 2022, Benjamin Staern was featured composer at the Stockholm Concert Hall Composer Weekend Festival, where 12 of his works were performed including the premiere ofby the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.
2024–2026, Benjamin Staern is the "artistic partner" of Västerås Sinfonietta for whom he will compose a flute concerto and a double concerto for violin, piano and chamber orchestra.
