Jacob Mühlrad
Biography
Jacob Mühlrad, celebrated Swedish art music composer, born 1991, has rapidly emerged as one of the most recognizable composers in Europe, and has had his work performed at the biggest venues in Sweden, as well as Carnegie Hall in New York, and Bamberg Hall in Germany. His latest release “Time” (out via Deutsche Grammophone) received a 5-five-star BBC Music Magazine review and he was described as “one the world’s best, most imaginative, orchestral composers”. Mühlrad has collaborated with soloists, such as Martin Fröst and Johannes Rostamo, and has also experimented with pop music collaborations, together with artists like the Swedish House Mafia, and rap artist, Silvana Imam.
Mühlrad has written extensively for chamber ensembles and orchestras. His choral music is a very distinctive and important element of his work, and through it he has been able to achieve a unique expression of the mystical aspect of Jewish tradition. Anim Zemirot (2013) represented a breakthrough for Mühlrad and is now a standard in the repertoire of many outstanding European choirs. His piece, Angelus Novus (2018), is being presented around the world by Martin Fröst. Kaddish (2017) is a work that holds a deeply personal connection to the composer. Jacob is a third-generation survivor and in his music, he tells the story of his grandfather’s survival of The Holocaust. In 2021, this selection of Mühlrad’s award-winning choir music, performed by the Swedish Radio Choir and conducted by Ragnar Bohlin and Fredrik Malmberg, was released on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label (in Sweden 2019, internationally 2021). In 2019, Jacob Mühlrad began a multi-year collaboration with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. This included the commission of two large orchestral works; REMS, the first one, was conducted by Pablo Heras Casado and presented during two sold-out premieres in September 2021.
Jacob Mühlrad’s scores for theater include “Tröstrapporter (Reports of Consolation)”, commissioned by The Royal Dramatic Theatre, written and directed by the best-selling author Alex Schulman. Over the past years, Mühlrad has worked on numerous high-profile campaigns for brands including Volvo, Einride, WhatsApp and Renewcell, winning several prestigious industry awards along the way. Currently, Jacob Mühlrad is working on a full score for the feature film “Burn All My Letters”, directed by the multi-award-winning director Björn Runge, and starring Bill Skarsgard, Gustav Lindh, and Asta August.
Film
Burn All My Letters / Bränn alla mina brev, 2022
Directed by Björn Runge
Witnesses, 2019
Directed by Mikael Jansson
A Dance, 2021
Directed by Alexander Wessely
Commercials
WhatsApp, 2021
Directed by Niclas Larsson
global campaign
Volvo "Family Safety: A million more", 2020
Directed by Laerke Herthoni
global campaign
Awards
2017 Micael Bindefeld’s Foundation Scholarship in memory of The Holocaust
2017 Rosenborg-Gehrmans’ study scholarship
2018 Special award from Anders Wall Foundation
2018 Nominee for The Swedish Music Publishers’ award
2018 TCO’s Culture Award
2019 Elle Gala Award
2019 Swedish Grammy Award nominee for "Time" album (Deutsche Grammophon)
FILMSCORE
BURN ALL MY LETTERS (BRÄNN ALLA MINA BREV)
Björn Runges's most recent film is an adaptation of Alex Schulman’s bestselling novel by the same name.
Spanning 70 years and based on true events, the sprawling drama sees August playing Karin Stolpe, a young intellectual torn between her complex relationship with her husband Sven Stolpe (Skarsgård), a famous Swedish author, and her fiery love affair with another author, Olof Lagercrantz in the 1930s. The film shows the repercussions of this tragic love triangle and the weight of family secrets on the childhood of Karin and Sven’s grandson, Alex Schulman (Sverrir Gudnason, “A Serious Game”) in the late 1980s. Now in his early 40s, Alex is going through a crisis with his wife Amanda (Sonja Richter, “The Bridge”) and starts investigating his family history to better understand his own psyche. What he discovers about his grandmother’s tumultuous life and sacrifices has a profound repercussion on his marriage.
Theatrical release (Sweden): 23 September 2022
FILMSCORE
WITNESSES
World renowned photographer Mikael Jansson has travelled across Sweden to listen to and document the last survivors of the holocaust.
Witnesses is a poignant and intimate film about what happened, and must never happen again. Mikael Jansson met, photographed and filmed 97 survivors of the holocaust, before the exhibition Witnesses. This beautifully composed documentary brings forward unimaginable and important accounts, as they tell us what happened to them and their families in the Germans’ death camps.
Some of these memories have never been told, or even shared with their own children. Most of them arrived in Sweden in their youth, right after the liberation. Today they are between 90 and 100 years old. Soon they will not be able to talk about what happened, to share with their own words what they saw and experienced. What sits before us are the last witnesses.