Biography
Johan Ullén was born Stockholm, Sweden. He studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Sibelius-Academy in Helsinki, Finland.
Johan, in his capacity as a pianist, has performed with the majority of Sweden’s orchestras, and has toured in Europe, the USA and South America. In 2000, he was appointed Swedish Radio’s artist in residence, a post which led to a large number of recordings and live broadcasts, heard throughout Europe.
As a composer, Johan has written chamber music, orchestral music, songs and operas, which have been performed both in Sweden and internationally in concert houses and at festivals.
The Deadly Sins, a suite of seven tangos for piano trio, has been performed around forty times by different ensembles in Sweden, Norway, Italy, Russia, Japan and elsewhere, and has been broadcast by Swedish Radio. Johan has made extensive use of the tango style, and was notably commissioned to write a tango-influenced piano concerto, premiered by Musica Vitae with Johan himself at the piano.
In 2009, Swedish Radio commissioned the song cycle Lady Macbeth for mezzo-soprano Katarina Karnéus, who, with pianist Matti Hirvonen, gave the premiere at Folkoperan in Stockholm as part of the Swedish Sopranos recital series. The same year, Johan was appointed festival composer at Strängnäs Summer Music, where his commissioned work for cello and piano, To be, was premiered.
The clarinet concerto Night Awake, was premiered by Kristian Möller and KammarensembleN in 2010. In the same year, Uppsala University commissioned the orchestral work Amygdala, which has since been performed in Sweden, Italy and Spain.
In 2011, Johan was appointed composer in residence at the Chamber Music Festival in Linköping, Sweden, during which many of his works were performed. The festival also commissioned and premiered his piece for clarinet and string quartet, Dream of Sorrow.
Uppsala Chamber Soloists commissioned the piece Libertine for string sextet, which they premiered in 2012, and have gone on to perform extensively. The same year, After the End of Time, a co-production with fellow composer Jonas Bohlin, was premiered in the Grunewald Hall in Stockholm. An international radio version of this work was produced in 2013.
Since its composition in 2012, Johan’s work for electrical duo ‘essens:1’, [train.rain.loops], has been performed around thirty times.
In October 2013, a new, longer and expanded version of Lady Macbeth, now for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, was commissioned and premiered by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, again with soloist Katarina Karnéus.
Later the same year, Swedish Television broadcast The Deadly Sins, performed by Trio Nova, joined by Swedish Academy member Kristina Lugn, interposing her sin-inspired texts between the tangos.
Later the same year, Swedish Television broadcast The Deadly Sins, performed by Trio Nova, joined by Swedish Academy member Kristina Lugn, interposing her sin-inspired texts between the tangos.
