Torleif Thedéen

Torleif Thedéen emerged as a leading cellist whose concerto engagements and chamber collaborations have featured distinguished performers and ensembles throughout Scandinavia and internationally, while he has simultaneously earned acclaim as an educator. Born in Sweden during 1962, Thedéen achieved an unusually swift breakthrough in 1985 by capturing three major cello competitions in a single year—the Hammer-Rostropowitsch, the Pablo Casals, and the European Broadcasting Union's International Tribune. These victories produced an immediate recording agreement with BIS, resulting in the 1986 release titled The Russian Cello. Thereafter he appeared regularly with leading Scandinavian orchestras under conductors such as Paavo Berglund, Leif Segerstam, and the then-rising Esa-Pekka Salonen. His 1994 BIS recording of the Shostakovich cello concertos, made with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by James DePreist, received a Cannes Classical Award the following year, and his 1999 account of Bach’s cello suites likewise attracted strong critical notice. Concerto engagements soon extended outside Scandinavia to include the BBC Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic, and the Czech Philharmonic. Thedéen undertook consecutive tours of New Zealand and Australia during the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 seasons and became a regular participant at major European festivals, among them the Verbier Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival. In the later phase of his career, touring and recording projects with other prominent soloists assumed increasing prominence; he collaborated on both tours and recordings with violinist Janine Jansen and violist Maxim Rysanov during the late 2000s. In 2018 he shared the Edison Prize for a recording of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time performed with Jansen, clarinetist Martin Fröst, and pianist Lucas Debargue. For his solo projects Thedéen transferred from BIS to the CPO label, issuing in 2019 a recording of Aram Khachaturian’s Cello Concerto with the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie under Daniel Raiskin. He served on the faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen between 1992 and 1996, and since 1996 has held a professorship at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Stockholm.