Karin Rehnqvist wins 2022 Nordic Council Music Prize

The winner of last year prize, Faroese artist Eivør Pálsdóttir, presented Karin Rehnqvist with the prize at an awards ceremony broadcast live from Helsinki’s Musikhuset on Tuesday evening.

The 2022 Nordic Council Music Prize goes to Karin Rehnqvist from Sweden for her work Silent Earth.

“Silent Earth” is a bewildering and powerfully encouraging work which greatly impressed the adjudication committee.  With the climate catastrophe as its foundation, a major dramatic musical narrative for choir and orchestra emerges and leads the listener from ice into fire with a relentless force. In her work, Rehnqvist reveals her almost absolute mastery of the craft.  With a masterful touch, she manages to demonstrate the capacity of music to simultaneously define time and space, and provide an emotional experience, free for everyone to interpret. Through all that darkness, the creative force sprouts at the same time and spreads the rumour that perhaps it may just be the only hope of humankind.

The prize is awarded on alternate years to an ensemble or artist in one year and, as this year, to a work by a living composer.

The Nordic Council awards five prizes each year – for literature, film, music, the environment, and children’s and young people’s literature. The winners each receive DKK 300,000 along with the Nordlys statuette, which is presented at an awards ceremony in connection with the annual Session of the Nordic Council.