Britta Byström
Britta Byström (born 14 March 1977) is a Swedish classical composer who specializes in orchestral music but has also composed vocal music and opera. In 2015, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra honoured her as the winner of the Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award for Female Composers. Biography. Born in Sundsvall, Sweden, Britta Byström was not raised in a musical family but became interested in music at the age of 10 when she began to play the trumpet. After writing tunes for the trumpet, she started to compose for an orchestra made up of her teenage friends. By the time she  was 16, she had won a competition with the Umeå Symphony Orchestra. She was admitted to study composition at the Royal Swedish College of Music in 1995, under Pär Lindgren and Bent Sørensen, graduating in 2001. She has since composed more than 100 works, some of which have been performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Gürzenich orchestra and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. Some of her compositions have been written directly for soloists such as Radovan Vlatkovic, Malin Broman, Rick Stotijn and Janine Jansen. Several of Byström's works have attracted particular attention. "Der Vogel der Nacht" (The Bird  of the Night) was inspired by Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony. It was first performed by the Swedish Radio Orchestra in 2010. The tone poem "Picnic at Hanging Rock", described by Byström as "music with disappearance", received the Christ Johnson prize in 2012, while "A Walk After Dark", a viola concerto, earned the Da-capo award at the 2014 Brandenburger Biennale. In 2016, she composed "Many, Yet One" for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It was given its world premiere in January 2018. "Parallel Universes", an orchestral work inspired by the cosmologist Max Tegmark's theories, was commissioned by BBC to  celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall 2021 and was first performed by BBC Philharmonic, conductor John Storgårds at the BBC Proms 2021. Britta Byström's music is since 2010 published by Edition Wilhelm Hansen. Since 2016, she is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. External links. (in Swedish)