Léonie Sonning Talent Prize 2012
Julia Dahlkvist started playing the piano at the age of three, with her mother, Midia Mustonen, as her teacher. After the family moved to Finland – when she was 16 – she studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg. She took her diploma examination as a pianist at the Berlin Hochschule der Künste. She subsequently studied at The Royal Irish Academy of Music, in Barcelona and, from 2005, at The Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Biography
Julia Dahlkvist was born in 1976 in a Finnish-Russian family in Siberia. She started playing the piano at the age of three, with her mother, Midia Mustonen, as her teacher. After the family moved to Finland – when she was 16 – she studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg. She took her diploma examination as a pianist at the Berlin Hochschule der Künste. She subsequently studied at The Royal Irish Academy of Music, in Barcelona and, from 2005, at The Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
Her most important teachers have been Erik. T. Tawaststjerna in Helsinki, Vitali Berzon in Freiburg, Laszlo Simon in Berlin, John O’Conor in Dublin, Alicia de Larrocha in Barcelona and Staffan Scheja in Stockholm. She has also taken part in master classes with Dominique Merlet, Klaus Hellwig and Olli Mustonen.
Julia Dahlkvist has given concerts since she was a child. Back then – in the communist Soviet Union – she was a child prodigy who gave concerts in the concert halls of Siberia, where it was often -10°C indoors and -40°C outdoors. Since then, she has given many concerts in Central Europe and Scandinavia. She has been a soloist with a number of orchestras and appeared at various music festivals and on TV and radio. Among other things, she has played the complete piano works of Debussy.
Julia has gained top positions in a number of piano competitions in such cities as Paris and Oslo, as well as in Italy. In 2004, she won the Nordic Blüthner piano competition in Malmö.
In April 2009, she made her debut in Stockholm with Rachmaninov’s 1st piano concerto together with the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.
Forthcoming activities
In early 2012 a CD appeared by the recording company Geniun, on which Julia Dahlkvist plays piano music by Claude Debussy, including Children’s Corner and the complete études. For more information, see: www.genuin.de
Scholarship from the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation
Julia Dahlkvist intends to use the scholarship from the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation for the issue of a CD, to study under Dominique Merlet in Paris and to take part in five international piano competitions in 2012-13.
