Norrbotten Neo

Norrbotten Neo
Photographer
Marie Lundgren
Norrbotten Neo is one of the 13 nominees for the 2023 Nordic Council Music Prize.

Rationale

For the audience, the encounter with contemporary classical music can be a breathtakingly beautiful and transformative experience. However, such an experience presupposes a musician who has dedicated their life to interpreting the multitude of modern traditions and honed their ability to charge tones, rhythms and sounds with intentions and direction, so that the music becomes theatre for the ears, by constantly changing colour and mood. This requires a musician with dazzling technique, the ability to go from the most subtle to the most brutal sound with the same conviction and with an almost absolute feel for the many musical styles of our time. The above may sound like a utopia, but in Norrbotten Neo we find musicians exactly like that. Since forming in 2007, these musicians have established themselves as one of northern Europe’s leading ensembles for contemporary classical music. With Norrbotten as their base, they have presented an impressive amount of newly written music at the highest artistic level. Over the years, Neo has collaborated closely with composers near and far, in chamber music form, in musical drama, and on CDs (among other digital formats).