About
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Swedish parents who moved the family back to Sweden when he was two, Herbert Blomstedt has spent nearly a century shaping the sound of some of the world's great orchestras. His conducting education took him through Stockholm, Uppsala, Darmstadt, Basel, Salzburg, and Tanglewood, where he worked with Leonard Bernstein, among others. He won the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize in 1953 and the Salzburg Conducting Competition in 1955, and went on to lead the Staatskapelle Dresden, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in long tenures that produced a string of prize winning recordings. He is especially celebrated for his way with German and Austrian repertoire, from Beethoven and Schubert to Bruckner and Richard Strauss, and has long been a devoted champion of Nordic composers like Sibelius, Nielsen, and Grieg. A committed Seventh day Adventist, he does not rehearse on Fridays or Saturdays, but he does conduct Saturday concerts, viewing live performance as an act of religious devotion rather than work. Now 98 years old, Blomstedt keeps an active schedule across Europe, the United States, and Japan, holding honorary conductor titles at orchestras including the Bamberg Symphony, the NHK Symphony, and the Oslo Philharmonic.