Biography
Joseph Swensen has served as Principal Conductor of Malmö Opera since 2007. He also currently holds the post of Principal Guest Conductor & Artistic Adviser with the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris and Conductor Emeritus with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Productions at Malmö Opera have included La Bohème, Macbeth, La Fanciulla del West, Salomé, La Traviata and Vanessa. The 2009-2010 Season includes productions of Carmelites and Der Rosenkavalier. Swensen recently made set of recordings with the Malmö Opera Orchestra, including a number of his own orchestrations of works by Schumann and Brahms. He will also embark upon a recording cycle with the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, marking the beginning of his tenure in September 2009.
Joseph Swensen was principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from 1996-2005 and has toured extensively with the SCO in the US, Far East, Spain and Portugal. They have performed together at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, Tanglewood and Ravinia Festivals, the BBC Proms, the Barbican and the Concertgebouw. Swensen and the orchestra have also made a series of recordings for Linn records, including music by Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Brahms, Prokofiev and Dvorak. His enthusiasm for new music has resulted in many major works written for both him and the SCO by such composers as James MacMillan, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Sally Beamish, Karin Rehnqvist and Elenor Alberga.
Swensen has a number of regular guest conducting commitments including the London Mozart Players, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre National de Montpellier, Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta de la Ciudad de Granada and Orquestra Nacional do Porto. With the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse he is conducting a Mahler cycle which will culminate in a performance of the 9th symphony in 2011, the centenary of Mahler’s death.
Before deciding to dedicate himself solely to his conducting career, Swensen enjoyed a highly successful career as a violin soloist and was an exclusive recording artist with BMG. Nowadays his occasional appearances as soloist are a natural extension of his work as a conductor, playing and directing concerti with the SCO and other orchestras with whom he enjoys a particularly close relationship. His love of chamber music results in occasional performances in that genre as well; for example in Oct 07 he performed at the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society in New York. Swensen is also active as a composer. Works include Mantram (1998) for string orchestra, Latif (1999) for solo cello with chamber ensemble, and Shizue (2001) for solo shakuhachi and orchestra and the recently premiered Sinfonia-Concertante for Horn and Orchestra (The Fire and the Rose) (2008). Swensen's orchestration of the rarely performed 1854 version of Brahms' Trio Op. 8, a work he has entitled Sinfonia in B, has been performed by orchestras in Europe and the US since its premiere in 2007.
Joseph Swensen was born in 1960 in New York (an American, of Norwegian-Japanese descent) he lives with his family in Copenhagen, Denmark.
December 2009
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