Composer Jonas Valfridsson is known for his personally colored music, with strong artistic values such as originality and beauty, and an attraction to the sublime. He has a clear focus on large-scale orchestral works. And it was with an orchestral work,In Killing Fields Sweet Butterfly Ascend, which was awarded third prize in the 2007 Toru Takemitsu Award, he stepped onto the international music scene.
Jonas Valfridsson was born in 1980 and grew up in Jönköping. He is educated at Gotland's Tonsättarskola and the composition department at the University of Gothenburg, then at the School of Music in Stockholm, where he obtained his master's degree. In addition to that, he has also studied at the prestigious Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris.
In recent years, Jonas Valfridsson has received attention for his stage works, including the short operaWhen buds breakwhich premiered at the Royal Opera in 2022. The opera revolves around Karin Boye's trip to Berlin and was warmly received by both audiences and critics. The music was composed with a "safe touch and stylistic feeling", considered Edward Klingspor in SvD.
INWhy do we love to sinkfor orchestra and actors, composed in 2023 for the 100th anniversary of the author Stig Dagerman's birth, Jonas Valfridsson musically captures Dagerman's restrained rage. His list of works also includes a series of evocatively dense and internationally recognized chamber music works.
Among his most significant orchestral works from recent years is a trilogy of works that draw inspiration from John Bauer's magically evocative paintings:John Bauer Overture,John Bauer Suite 1918and bassoon concertinoSwan Harbor. They also take their aesthetic cues from the music that characterized Bauer's contemporaries, which were the first decades of the 20th century. We are lured into a dreamy atmosphere, often with illuminated, painting sounds with streaks of Nordic folk tone. DN's Johanna Paulsson described the music as "continentally transparent" and "delicious".
Over the years, Jonas Valfridsson has been invited on numerous occasions as a scholarship holder or Composer in Residence, including at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany, where he composedThe Only Thing That You Keep Changing Is Your Namefor orchestra, which in 2010 won him first prize at the Uppsala composer competition. For the orchestral workA Sudden Recollection: Le Jardin des PlantesIn 2013, he was awarded first prize at the Anne-Sophie Mutter Fund and Norrköping Symphony Orchestra's composition competition. The following year he was Composer-in-Residence at the Sinfonietta Riga in Latvia, 2019–2020 at the Dalasinfonietta and the 2023–2024 season at his hometown Jönköping's sinfonietta when, among other things, he wrote the song cycleYearwith text by Rickard Söderberg, which premiered in spring 2024.
