Eldbjørg Hemsing
Biography
“a magnificent combination of purity and thrilling, Heifetz-like intensity” (The Strad)
“a radiant and top-calibre presentation” (BBC Music)
Born in the Valdres region of Norway, Eldbjørg Hemsing is one of today’s leading young violinists. Her mother too was a professional violinist, as is her sister Ragnhild, and music was ever-present in her childhood home. Her love of nature comes from her father, a scientist responsible for the protection of a nature reserve.
Hemsing seeks to introduce classical music to new audiences all over the world. Her international career has quickly taken flight: she has recorded three award-winning albums, premièred several highly acclaimed new compositions and appears in the world’s most celebrated concert halls, including Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, the Verbier Festival and the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Among the many orchestras she has performed with are the Oslo Philharmonic, the Stavanger Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the Shanghai and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras. She has appeared as Norway’s cultural ambassador at many major international venues, such as the United Nations, the Shanghai Expo and the UN Security Council, and has travelled the world with Norway’s royal family. She maintains a close working relationship with the composer Tan Dun, with whom she has premièred and recorded several prize-winning works and performs them in concert.
Hemsing is actively involved in a great many projects, all rooted in her passion for making classical music accessible to a broader public. As Senior Artistic Advisor of the renowned global research firm “Advisory Board for the Arts", she heads projects that convey new modes of thought to art organisations and artists. She is a co-founder of the Hemsing Festival and the artistic director of SPIRE, an innovative annual mentoring programme within the Nordland Music Festival in Bodø, which promotes and supports young artists in their personal and artistic development.
Eldbjørg Hemsing plays a “Rivaz, Baron Gutmann” Stradivarius, dating from the year 1707 and kindly placed at her disposal by the Dextra Musica Foundation.
Current album
Arctic
Artists Eldbjørg HemsingRelease Date: 02/03/2023
The Sony Classical debut album Arctic from internationally acclaimed Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing is a musical journey through the Arctic. It features newly composed music by composer stars such as Jacob Shea (“The Blue Planet”) from Bleeding fingers Music and Frode Fjellheim (“Frozen”). It is scheduled for release on 3 February 2023.
The collaboration between Sony Classical and concert violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing starts off with a unique concept album. Arctic is a musical journey through a stunningly beautiful region and a celebration of a fragile and largely unexplored ecosystem threatened by climate change. “The Arctic is often misrepresented as stark and uninhabitable wasteland,” Hemsing explains. “Yet it’s a region of matchless beauty abounding in life, one that magically illustrates how all things cohere in fragile cycles. Arctic is a musical journey through this unique and endangered natural habitat. I want this project to show people how magnificent and deserving of protection this landscape is, and to point out the threat of climate change, which affects us all.”
The centre piece of the album is the 20-minute “Arctic Suite” by L.A.-based film composer Jacob Shea from Bleeding fingers Music, who joined Hans Zimmer to write the iconic music to “The Blue Planet”, a favourite of millions of music lovers. In the six sections of his suite, Shea depicts the unique natural phenomena of the Arctic, finding melodies for “Frozen Worlds” in winter, the “Aurora” in the polar night and the “Sunrise” in the morning of the polar day. He lends sound to whirling swarms of fish in “Rush of Life” and the poetic whistling of the “Polar Winds” before he ends with a melancholy glance at current environmental changes in “Sea Ice Melting”.
Arctic was produced by the British Grammy- and BAFTA-winning sound engineer Jonathan Allen (Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Lisa Batiashvili, Andrea Bocelli) and recorded together with the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra in Bodø, a Norwegian town within the Arctic Circle.
