Per Lundberg
Piano

My name is Per Lundberg and I was born in Stockholm in 1962. When I was about four, my family moved from Stockholm to Norrköping, a city 160 km to the south, and that is my real home town. My parents are not musicians, but my father listened to a lot of jazz and my mother bought a piano for me, and I began to play it when I was about seven.
My parents saw to it that I started off with a sound musical education and a lot of choral singing. My true interest in music was engendered when I was ten, when I found an old LP my mother had inherited from her brother – Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in B flat minor with the pianist Van Cliburn in a live recording made at the famous Moscow competition in the fifties. I was completely enthralled by the music and decided there and then to become a pianist.
It was probably more by luck than judgement that I met the pianist Marianne Jacobs, who became my first important teacher. She introduced me seriously to the world of music, which finally helped me to gain a place at Edsberg Manor in Sollentuna, then run by Swedish Radio and since 1999 by the Swedish Royal College of Music. Edsberg is a small exclusive college with only 25 students – string players and pianists. The central focus was chamber music, which exerted great influence on my musical career via the professors, José Ribera (piano), Endre Wolf (violin) and Frans Helmerson (cello). I graduated after another three years of study with Professor Heinz Medjimorec at the Vienna College of Music and Performing Arts. I then returned to Stockholm, where for almost twenty-five years I worked as accompanist and finally as professor of chamber music at Edsberg Manor.
The time I spent in Vienna was extremely important to me, and foremost among all the unforgettable memories are the concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein.
As a pianist, I have performed in chamber groupings in most European countries and above all in Scandinavia. Together with Sara Hesselink, leader, and Claes Gunnarsson, solo cellist of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, I perform in the Trio Poseidon, which records for Chandos and other labels.
Like Maja Weber, I have for twenty years been a member of Ars Amata Zurich, which performs in various groupings, but focuses mainly on piano quartets and quintets.
I also regularly appear as a soloist, and in 1997 gave the Swedish first performance of Lutoslawski’s Piano Concerto of 1989 with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.
I have been one of the driving forces behind the very successful international Lyckå Chamber Music Festival in Karlskrona for thirty years now. I was given a professorship in accompaniment and chamber music at the Norwegian College of Music in Oslo in 2013, and that has compelled me to withdraw from of some my activities at Edsberg Manor.
I live in Enskede in the south of Stockholm with my wife, who is also a pianist, my daughter, who is twenty-one and is studying the violin at the College of Music, and my son, who is nineteen and wants to become a cellist. I have many interests. Among others, I took up gliding twenty years ago and have renovated my 1920s villa from top to bottom myself. I am hopelessly in love with the dreamlike Stockholm skerries. One of my big dreams came true a few years ago, when I bought my boat, an Oxelö 27 called Victoria. With her I enjoy that wonderful countryside between small islands and skerries every summer.