Biography
An award-winning Norwegian mezzo-soprano, Tora Augestad has long championed compositions from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries while establishing herself as a leading interpreter of works by Kurt Weill, John Cage, Cathy Berberian, and Luciano Berio. Opera houses and festivals throughout Norway and across Europe regularly feature her performances.
Born in Bergen in 1979, she pursued studies in classical music and jazz singing in Oslo and Stockholm, concentrating on twentieth- and twenty-first-century repertoire. Time spent in Berlin and Munich deepened her engagement with German music, after which she completed a degree in cabaret singing at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. In 2004 she assembled the ensemble Music for a While, drawing together prominent figures from the Norwegian jazz community; the group also explores early classical repertoire. Their 2007 debut recording, Weill Variations, earned her the Lotte Lenya Prize. She then joined Swiss director Christoph Marthaler for the premiere of Beat Furrer’s music-theater piece “Wüstenbuch” with Klangforum Wien, and their artistic partnership has endured. In 2010 she and pianist Ivar Anton Waagaard issued Over the Piano: American Cabaret Songs.
Music for a While followed with the 2012 release Graces That Refrain, presenting fresh arrangements of classical arias. Augestad is likewise a founding member of the clarinet-cello-voice trio BOA, whose 2013 debut mOOn Over tOwns invited fourteen Norwegian composers to write original three-and-a-half-minute works. That same year she sang Berio’s “Folk Songs” at Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal, with the Remix Ensemble under Peter Rundel. Music for a While’s Canticles of Winter appeared the following year. In 2015 she received a nomination for the Nordic Council Music Prize alongside Anna Sofie von Otter, Apocalyptica, Hamferd, and the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, and she assumed the role of artistic co-director at Norway’s Hardanger Music Festival.
She serves as vocalist for saxophonist and composer Trygve Seim’s quartet, which also includes accordionist Frode Haltli and Svante Henryson. Their ECM album Rumi Songs, released in September 2016, originated in a commission the singer placed in memory of soprano Anne-Lise Berntsen, who had first encouraged Seim to set the material in 2003; the recording features Coleman Barks’s English renderings of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet’s verses.
Born in Bergen in 1979, she pursued studies in classical music and jazz singing in Oslo and Stockholm, concentrating on twentieth- and twenty-first-century repertoire. Time spent in Berlin and Munich deepened her engagement with German music, after which she completed a degree in cabaret singing at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. In 2004 she assembled the ensemble Music for a While, drawing together prominent figures from the Norwegian jazz community; the group also explores early classical repertoire. Their 2007 debut recording, Weill Variations, earned her the Lotte Lenya Prize. She then joined Swiss director Christoph Marthaler for the premiere of Beat Furrer’s music-theater piece “Wüstenbuch” with Klangforum Wien, and their artistic partnership has endured. In 2010 she and pianist Ivar Anton Waagaard issued Over the Piano: American Cabaret Songs.
Music for a While followed with the 2012 release Graces That Refrain, presenting fresh arrangements of classical arias. Augestad is likewise a founding member of the clarinet-cello-voice trio BOA, whose 2013 debut mOOn Over tOwns invited fourteen Norwegian composers to write original three-and-a-half-minute works. That same year she sang Berio’s “Folk Songs” at Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal, with the Remix Ensemble under Peter Rundel. Music for a While’s Canticles of Winter appeared the following year. In 2015 she received a nomination for the Nordic Council Music Prize alongside Anna Sofie von Otter, Apocalyptica, Hamferd, and the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra, and she assumed the role of artistic co-director at Norway’s Hardanger Music Festival.
She serves as vocalist for saxophonist and composer Trygve Seim’s quartet, which also includes accordionist Frode Haltli and Svante Henryson. Their ECM album Rumi Songs, released in September 2016, originated in a commission the singer placed in memory of soprano Anne-Lise Berntsen, who had first encouraged Seim to set the material in 2003; the recording features Coleman Barks’s English renderings of the thirteenth-century Sufi poet’s verses.
Albums
Ingenting forsvinner
2025
I et landskap
2024
Henrik Hellstenius: Past & Presence
2021
Philippe Manoury: Lab.Oratorium
2021
Good Vibes in Bad Times
2020
Portraying Passion
2018
Canticles of Winter
2014
Singles
