Conductor Herbert Blomstedt is a member of the top rank of modern orchestra conductors, having held long-term music directorships in both Europe and the U.S. Specializing in Romantic and early 20th century repertory, he has recorded a substantial body of work and has remained active into great old age.
Blomstedt was born on July 11, 1927, in Springfield, Massachusetts, but his parents were Swedish, and they returned to their home country when Blomstedt was four. He grew up partly in Finland. His mother gave him piano lessons, and he took courses at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm while pursuing a general degree at the University of Uppsala.
Drawn to conducting, he traveled to Paris for lessons with Igor Markevitch. This phase of Blomstedt’s education laid the groundwork for his later versatility as a conductor as he studied contemporary music in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1949, took pioneering classes in Baroque music with Paul Sacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, and took lessons at the Juilliard School in New York with Jean Morel, and with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts.
Blomstedt’s career was launched as he won the Koussevitsky Conducting Prize in 1953 and the Salzburg Conducting Competition in 1955. He held the post of first conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic from 1962 to 1968 and was appointed music director of the Royal Danish Symphony in Copenhagen in 1967, remaining in that post until 1977.
Blomstedt became familiar to American audiences as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, a position he held for many years. In 1995, Blomstedt returned to Europe as the music director of the NDR Symphony in Hamburg, moving three years later to the same post with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
I admire Herbert Blomstedt for his positive, youthful thinking, his commitment to music, and his steadfast adherence to his faith. Listen now as he conducts the Eroica Symphony:
