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Josefine Opsahl

cello
composer
1992
Josefine Opsahl © Rasmus Sigvaldi.jpg

Josefine Opsahl is a remarkable cellist, composer and artist who connects music, art, performance and spaces in her work, extending her classical training within music, her knowledge of its history and perception of art and self into new kinds of expression. Open to sounds, genre, and the use of electronics, Opsahl’s works unfold in the intersection between tradition and renewal, expertise and intuition. She counterposes the score and the improvised in seeking the direction in which musical expression, art and society are heading. Her musical skills, creative approach and performative qualities with her primary instrument, the cello, have established Opsahl and her projects on the international scene.

She writes, curates, improvises and performs, extending her musical worlds through collaborations with other artists, curators, festivals and spaces and moving beyond the grid of genres and expressions. This has led to commissions by museums, galleries, festivals and occasions, for example for HM Queen Margrethe II of Denmark’s state visits to Buenos Aires and Berlin, for Festival Música Estranha, DEIÀ International Music Festival, Intonal Festival, Golden Days Festival in Copenhagen, for the National Gallery of Denmark, Thorvaldsen’s Museum and the Utzon Center. Opsahl’s works have been performed throughout Europe, in China, Brazil and Argentina, and her album releases have received excellent reviews and awards, most recently the Round Glass Music Award and the Danish Radio P2’s Listeners’ Prize. Opsahl has given lectures in Shanghai, at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Copenhagen. She studied classical and contemporary cello playing at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and Northwestern University in the US and holds an Advanced Postgraduate Soloist degree in Contemporary Creative Art from the Danish National Academy of Music.