Hi there!
Welcome to my homepage - I’m glad you found your way here!
I’m a Finnish-Swedish mezzo-soprano and as of 2024 I’m based in Oslo as a freelance musician. I’m a versatile artist or you can also call me a curious and passionate wild child.
The current project I’m working on is the music theatre play ’Katrina’, where I sing the title role. The opening night is on July 17th 2024 at Alandica Hall on the Åland Islands, Finland. I very much enjoy the physical stage work with stage director Ida Kronholm and choreographer Soledad Howe as well as my fellow colleagues on stage. And to both sing and do spoken dialogues is very interesting and quite new to me! Please check my calendar for more details.
My repertoire stretches from early baroque to contemporary music. My curiosity and my passion for performance lead to an eternal search to discover new avenues of expression and to continually challenging myself, whether performing opera, sacred music, recitals, musical theatre or spoken word. I’m terrified of losing myself into apathy and non-thinking, to becoming someone else’s marionette. I very much enjoy physical movement on stage and for me the whole body is being part in the expression, not only the text or the music.
I’m inspired by many things but mostly by brave people! I’m inspired by those who dear to ask the hard questions, by those who challenge old conventions and by those who want to change structures in the art field. Other liberal arts such as literature, psychology and philosophy interests and inspires me as well as our complex bodies and the voice; I mean, how fascinating aren’t these a couple of centimeter small vocal cords in our throats?!
And what sure does not inspire me is namedropping, putting people on pedestals, inequality and injustice.
A bit about my background
Growing up in Närpes, a rural Swedish-speaking area in Finland, classical music was not familiar to me, but learning to play the French horn as a child led to a fascination with classical singing during my teen years. These interests led me to pursue studies as a young singer at the Conservatory of Music in Kokkola in Finland, further to the Piteå University of Music in Northern Sweden, thence to conclude my education at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in 2016. The most important guides during my studies have been mezzo-soprano Monica Groop and sopranos Christiane Iven, Emma Rönnlund and Synnöve Dellquist.
After graduating opera performances at the Finnish National Opera, Savonlinna Opera Festival, Vaasa Baroque Festival, Tampere Opera, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre in Stockholm ensued as well as soloist appearances with Turku Philharmonia, The Chamber Orchestra of Lapland, Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra and Vaasa City Orchestra, to name a few.
Between 2019 and 2023 I was a member of the opera ensemble at the Oldenburg State theater in Germany.
Opera roles I have performed include Hänsel (Humperdinck: Hänsel und Gretel), Octavian (R. Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier), Concepcíon (Ravel: L’heure espagnol), Annio (Mozart: La clemenza di Tito), Kuchtík (Dvorak: Rusalka), Cupid (Blow: Venus and Adonis), Ruggiero (Händel: Alcina), Dorabella (Mozart: Così fan tutte), Siebel (Gounod: Faust), Alcina (F. Caccini: L’isola d’Alcina) and Cherubino (Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro). And some contemporary opera roles; Serafina Suomi (O. Kortekangas: Veljeni vartija), Frida Kahlo (K. Aho), Katrina (J.Mattsson: Katrina) and Elisa (J. Sandström: Elisa och fantasin).
Solo songs and lieder lie particularly close to my heart. A two year research and performance grant (2024-2026) from the Swedish Cultural Fund in Helsinki will allow me to explore two fields; art songs by female composers and norm critical / ’gender curious’ interpretation in the field of opera. As well as learning new repertoire, I hope, during this time, to deepen my insights and widen my views on singing, interpretation and performance and to find inspiration through encounters with other artists and artforms.
My mother-tongue is Swedish, but I’m also more or less fluent in English, German, Finnish and Norwegian.
In closing, I would like to quote the composer Nadia Boulanger:
“Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.”
Feel free to call me or send me an email if you are interested in working with me or of you just wanna have a chat about life in general!
Take care,
Erica
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