Jacob Mühlrad

Composer Jacob Mühlrad has had his pieces presented across numerous nations by prominent orchestras and vocal ensembles while also teaming up with artists from the pop sphere. Born in Stockholm on April 9, 1991, into a Jewish family whose three grandparents endured the Holocaust, he has devoted several compositions to Jewish subjects. At fifteen he discovered a damaged synthesizer and began tinkering with its sounds, sparking a passion for music that persisted despite the reading and writing difficulties posed by autism. He overcame those obstacles and took lessons from Sven-David Sandström before enrolling at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and later completing a master’s degree at its London counterpart. Early acclaim arrived in his twenties when the 2013 choral piece Anim Zemirot entered the regular programs of numerous European choirs, and at twenty-four he became the youngest composer whose work reached the stage of the Royal Swedish Opera. In 2016 his solo cello composition Pan sounded at Carnegie Hall in New York, and three years afterward Elle magazine selected him as Sweden’s best-dressed man. Performances have taken place at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Victoria Hall in Singapore, and Vancouver’s Orpheum, where he joined forces with the Vancouver Chamber Choir; among his chamber-music partners is clarinetist Martin Fröst. On the pop front he supplied a symphonic arrangement titled One Symphony of Swedish House Mafia’s hit single One (Your Name). His first orchestral score, REMS (“Rapid Eye Movement Sleep”), was commissioned in 2021 by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and he has also composed for film. Warner Classics issued his recording debut in 2022 with the soundtrack to Burn All My Letters, followed in 2023 by the same label’s release of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic’s account of REMS.