Biography
Music Director of Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá, is widely recognized as one of the major Scandinavian conductors of his generation.
Joachim Gustafsson works regularly with includes Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Malmö
Symphony Orchestra,Malmö Opera Orchestra, The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic,
Copenhagen Philharmonic, The Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic in Lodz, Odense Symphony Orchestra, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, South Jutland Symphony Orchestra, The Nordic Chamber
Orchestra, Gothenburg Opera Orchestra, The Royal Navy Band, Gothenburg Wind
Orchestra, ,The Dala Sinfonietta, Orquesta Filarmonica Juvenil de Bogota, Aarhus Sinfonietta to name a few. Gustafsson is also regular guest conductor at The Danish National Opera where he most recently revived the opera Cleopatra by Danish-Italian late-romantic composer August Enna, a huge success also available at Da Capo Records. Other productions includes The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Thomas Agerfeldt-Olesen ( released on DVD by Da Capo Records).
Together with pianist Niklas Sivelöv and Orquesta
Filarmónica de Bogotá he is recording the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos.
He has also recorded music by August
Enna with his orchestra on the Da Capo Label , featuring the 2nd Symphony and
Violin Concerto with danish violinist Anna Agafia Egholm. Coming recording projects includes symphonies by Victor Bendix and orchestral music by Carl Nielsen, Hans Abrahamsen, Niklas Sivelöv and Martin Stauning.
Together with The Malmö Symphony Orchestra he has recorded Symphony no 1 and 3 by Victor Bendix on Da Capo ,and Geoffrey Gordon’s Concerto for Bass Clarinet titled Prometheus
to be released on Toccata Classics.
With the Malmö Opera Orchestra he has recorded symphonies by Niklas Sivelöv on Toccata Classics and Naxos. Other recordings with The Malmö Opera Orchestra includes the award-winning production of the complete orchestral music of Else-Marie Pade. Joachim Gustafsson made his operatic debut with Verdi’s Otello in 2004 at The Royal Opera Stockholm . Joachim Gustafsson is also Artistic Leader of the Tommie Haglund Festival in Halmstad, Sweden. This is an orchestra/chamber music festival held biannually devoted to themusic of Tommie Haglund. In 2022 he toured Sweden with OFB, the first appearance of a South American in Scandinavian.
Reviews
The Swedish conductor has a very deep knowledge of the score; In his approach to
Mahler, he showed that something more than mastery of the printed score is
needed to bring out, for example, the passages impregnated with ländlers and
waltzes, and sometimes being seemingly rough and even grotesque – very much in
the composer’s atavistic aesthetic – without allowing himself self for a second
bordering on the banal.
Mahler 9
El Nuevo Siglo
Enna’s
score is gloriously rich, with echoes of Strauss’s tone poems and Wagner’s
Tannhäuser particularly.
The Odense Symphony Orchestra is on excellent form and conductor Joachim Gustafsson
allows Enna’s complex score to breathe but never sag.
Enna ”Kleopatra”
BBC Music Magazine
Stockhausen’s
influence looms large over that piece, while the pointed nocturne Parametre
(1962) appears more like a determined exploration of string sonorities and
spatial counterpoint. Marstal’s
likening of the piece to Boulez, Pade’s
contemporary in Darmstadt, seems appropriate but there’s something quite Danish (and
prescient) about those tonal and rhetorical elements that invade the music with
a smile. Joachim Gustafsson presides over an on-point performance.
Gramophone
Ein grossartiger Interpretation, Joachim Gustafsson hat
es genial verstanden.
Brahms Requiem
Norddeutsche Zeitung
You have to acknowledge him as the major interpreter of
Haglunds work!
Musicweb International.