Nils Schweckendiek

The longtime conductor of the Helsinki Chamber Choir, Nils Schweckendiek is a champion of contemporary music who has premiered more than 100 works. He is also an important educator. Schweckendiek has built the Helsinki Chamber Choir into a major recording ensemble that has issued a series of albums on the major BIS label. Those include Joy & Asymmetry: Rautavaara, Aho (2024). Schweckendiek was born in Germany in 1978 but grew up in Britain. He studied music at Clare College, Cambridge, and went on for conducting studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany and then to the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, where he received a master's degree in 2005. His teachers were a distinguished list that included Leif Segerstam, Neeme Järvi, and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Schweckendiek made his debut at the Helsinki Opera in 2006, conducting Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier. The following year, he was named artistic director of the Helsinki Chamber Choir, a position he continues to hold. He was the conductor of the Ulm Opera in Germany from 2009 to 2013, and in 2017, he became the artistic director of the Choir of the Helsinki Music Centre. In 2012, he founded the Einojuhani Rautavaara Composition Competition and became its artistic director. He and the Helsinki Chamber Choir began an ongoing association with the BIS label in 2017, releasing an album of choral music by composer Erik Bergman. Schweckendiek has guest conducted widely in Europe in orchestral music, opera, and choral music, appearing with such groups as the Leipzig Opera, the RIAS Kammerchor, and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He became a professor of choral conducting at the Sibelius Academy in 2014 and joined the faculty on a permanent basis in 2018. Schweckendiek was awarded the Fredrik Pacius Prize for services to Finnish music in 2020. By that time, he had recorded several more albums for BIS, all of them devoted to contemporary music except for Riemuitkaamme!: A Finnish Christmas (2017). He has also recorded for the Alba label. In 2021, Schweckendiek and the Helsinki Chamber Choir released a pair of albums, Under the Arching Heavens: A Requiem by Alex Freeman and a performance of Arvo Pärt's Passio. He and the Helsinki Chamber Choir returned in 2023 on BIS with the album Reconnaissance: Kaija Saariaho Choral Music and the following year with Joy & Asymmetry: Rautavaara, Aho. ~ James Manheim, Rovi