Praised internationally for his performances of the contemporary cello repertoire, Jakob Kullberg, is one of the most established and diverse Danish instrumentalists. Top prize winner at international solo and chamber music competitions, Jakob has been artist in residence with the International Carl Nielsen Competition, the Tivoli Garden Concert Hall as well with Polish institutions such as Orkiestra Muzyki Nowej from Katowice and with the 29th International Krakow Composers’ Festival. Jakob is halfway through a large-scale recording project with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with whom he will release five cello concertos on two CDs. He is twice winner of the Danish Grammy, most recently for his concerto CD ’Momentum’. This CD was also nominated for the Gramophone Award, was Album of the Week with Q2 Music, New York and praised in The Strad Magazine:
”He has a staggering control of tone – sometimes elegant or glassy, at other times angry or pleadingly reedy – and he uses it magnificently to put across Nørgård’s volatile emotions. He’s gloriously intense in Nordheim’s darkhued Tenebrae, and relishes the demanding extended technique in a thrillingly lucid account of Saariaho’s impressionistic Amers, vivid and multicoloured.”
Other high profile orchestras that he regularly appears with include the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Warsaw Symphony (Sinfonia Varsovia), as well as the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian symphony orchestras and Sinfoniettas. He recently made his debut with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, the Croatian Radio Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra and received great praise from his debut with Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra:
”Kullberg showed himself to be another in that extraordinary line of magnificent Scandinavian cello players that have enriched the world in recent years and his performance was greeted with the standing ovation both it and the performance richly deserved.”
He has also played with Finnish orchestras such as the Oulo Symphony Orchestra and Helsinki modern music orchestra, the Avanti! Ensemble with whom he has performed all concerti by Saariaho.
Jakob has returned frequently to prestigious international festivals such as the Aldeburgh Festival, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, the Huddersfield Festival, Bergen International Festival, and local Copenhagen festivals Njord Biennale and Klang Festival. Jakob enjoys a unique working relationship with the Danish composer Per Nørgård, who has composed and dedicated numerous works for him. The two have developed a rare dialogical collaboration facilitating the cellist as co-creator. Similarly Jakob is also a notable interpreter and collaborator of Bent Sørensen and Kaija Saariaho; who have both composed for him.
Jakob has a special approach to contemporary music, borne out of 20 years of collaboration with Per Nørgård. He has shaped a mode of composer/performer collaboration that places the performer inside the creative process. Not unlike a method-actor Jakob‘s modus operandi has him insisting on being the material, which necessitates being involved with creatively shaping the material in one form or another be it orchestration, cadenza composition, etc. As such Nørgård sanctioned Jakob‘s attempt at a double-concerto called Three Nocturnal Movements, which sees Kullberg in a myriad of creative roles from arrangement through orchestration to actual composition on Nørgård’s material. Jakob recently recorded Kaija Saariaho’s 2nd Cello Concerto, Notes on Light, with his own cadenza on which the composer and he collaborated.
In 2018 Jakob sat on the juries of the Schoenfeld International String Competition in Harbin, China as well as the Karol Szymanowski International Music Competition in Katowice, Poland. Professor of Cello at the Royal College of Music, London he taught for a decade at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. Since 2004 he has been artistic director of the Open Strings Academy, and has given numerous masterclasses throughout Europe and the U.S.A, most recently at the Peabody Conservatory as well as at New York University. He is also an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London and recently finished a four-year research project as Artistic Research Fellow (PhD) at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo.
