Mikael Karlsson Bio
“Mikael Karlsson is a shining star of his generation. With an impressive catalog of works for the stage and concert hall, his music reveals a composer of astonishing imagination and emotional power.” – citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
“Mikael Karlsson embodies the composer of the future.” – Dagens Nyheter, Johanna Paulsson.
“Mikael Karlsson is to be considered one of today’s greatest avant-gardists in opera” – OPUS magazine
Mikael is a composer who specializes in dramatic music for dance, ballet, opera, theater and for singers, and writes concert music for orchestras, chamber ensembles and solo instrumentalists. His works often make extensive use of live electronics in surround sound multichannel format running parallel with (acoustic) orchestras and ensembles. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, MuTh Konzertsaal, Berwaldhallen, MoMA, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Paris Opera Palais Garnier, Oslo Opera House, Berwaldhallen, the Royal Swedish Opera,Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, at the Nobel Prize Banquet, the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, at the International Edinburgh Festival, the Baltic Sea Festival, and many other opera houses, festivals and concert venues across Europe, Asia, and the US.
Since 2010, Mikael has written the music for most of choreographer Alexander Ekman’s ballets, dance works and installations. Their full evening pieces include Play, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Escapist, Hammer, A Swan Lake, Cow, Frailty of Man. Their shorter works include Tyll, Resin, Left Right Left Right, and Tuplet, All of their full evening pieces are frequently performed across the world and are regularly broadcast on major TV networks. Play will by the end of 2024 have been performed to more than 70 sold out houses at the Paris Opera and in Japan.
Mikael has composed two grand operas with longterm collaborator and librettist Royce Vavrek. The first, Melancholia – an adaptation of the Lars von Trier film – was commissioned by the Royal Swedish Opera and premiered in 2023, directed by Slava Daubnerová, conducted by Andrea Molino, with a cast that included Lauren Snouffer, Rihab Chaieb and Anne Sofie von Otter. The opera was recorded by EuroArts and has been broadcast on Arté, Medici TV, Mezzo TV and SVT. The opera sold out its premiere run and was dubbed “The coolest opera in a long time […] visually rich, beautiful and musically exciting by newspaper Expressen, and Sweden’s leading newspaper Dagens Nyheter wrote “Composer Mikael Karlsson’s and librettist Royce Vavrek’s full evening opera is the crowning achievement of the Royal Swedish Opera’s 250 year anniversary celebration.”
Their second grand opera, Fanny and Alexander, was adapted from the Ingmar Bergman film. It was commissioned by Opera La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels. The world premiere production is directed by Ivo van Hove, and conducted by Ariane Matiakh, with a cast that includes Thomas Hampson, Anne Sofie von Otter, Sasha Cooke, Peter Tantsits, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, Loa Falkman and Susan Bullock. Fanny and Alexander premieres December 1, 2024. Both operas were orchestrated with Michael P. Atkinson. De Standaard declared it the best stage work of 2024. Die Welt wrote “A successful Gesamtkunstwerk that really functions as the sum of its individual parts, in which without exception all ingredients contribute equally to the loudly acclaimed, atmospherically rich success.” Oper Magazine wrote “Mikael Karlsson has turned Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Fanny and Alexander’ into a congenial opera, commissioned by La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels. His extremely effective music finds precise characterizations for the sprawling cast as well as for individual scenes.”
Their work in dance includes Crypto with choreographer Guillaume Coté, and Evidence of it All with choreographer Drew Jacoby, with a vocal performance by actress Rosamund Pike.
Mikael’s first opera, The Echo Drift, with a libretto by Elle Kunnos de Voss and Kathryn Walat, premiered at the PROTOTYPE Festival in NYC in 2018. Mallory Catlett directed the opera. Mallory and Mikael are currently working on a new chamber opera, Barcelona – Map of Shadows, adapted from the play by Lluïsa Cunillé. It will premiere in NYC in 2026.
Mikael has written music for choreographer Mari Carrasco’s dance pieces Remind Me I’m Not Dead, Forever, The Heart, Burn Baby Burn, Paper Plane, Black Forest and Internally Black; for choreographer Morgann Runacre-Temple’s Coppelia (with Michael P. Atkinson), Hotel, and Averno; for choreographer Daniel Proietto’s Rasa, Player and Blanc; for choreographer Helen Pickett’s To Be One and IN Cognito; for Hervé Koubi’s Sol Invictus; and five full evening pieces with choreographer Benoit-Swan Pouffer for Cedar Lake Ballet in NYC.
Anne Sofie von Otter and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra commissioned the song cycle So We Will Vanish from Royce and Mikael in 2021. The piece received rave reviews and will by the end of 2024 have been performed by Anne Sofie with five more orchestras. Anne Sofie is among the premiere cast of both Melancholia and Fanny and Alexander.
Anna von Hausswolff and Mikael composed the music for the Nobel Prize Banquet 2018. The three pieces were performed by Anna, the Royal Swedish Orchestra and members of the Royal Opera Chorus conducted by James Grossmith, with Mikael on piano and pipe organ. In 2025 they premiered their second large-scale composition – Grand Guignol – with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Choir, live electronics in surround sound, conducted by Christoph Koncz, with solo vocals by Anna as part of the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm.
Since 2014, Mikael collaborates closely with orchestrator, composer, conductor and French hornist Michael P. Atkinson, who either handles or shares orchestration duties for all of Mikael’s pieces with an orchestra. For the Scottish Ballet’s new version of Coppelia (with choreographers Morgann Runnacre-Temple and Jessica White), and Mary – Queen of Scots (with choreographer Sophie LaPlane and director James Bonas) the two composed the scores together. Both shows became a breakout hit of the 2022 and 2025 Edinburgh International Festivals, and traveled to Sadler’s Wells in London. Michael has conducted numerous album recordings of Mikael’s music.
He and his team wrote music for Electronic Arts’ / DICE video games Battlefield Bad Company I and II in 2005 and 2007.
Mikael has written music for the International Contemporary Ensemble, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Mivos Quartet, Sirius Quartet, the Dahlkvist Quartet, Sybarite5, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, New Thread Quartet, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, The Royal Swedish Orchestra, the Oslo Opera House Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Vienna Opera Orchestra. He has supplied music for fashion shows by J. Anderson / Loewe, Henrik Vibskov and Alain Paul Studio, and film music for films by Bruce LaBruce, Barbara Hammer, and Johnny Taranto.
He has collaborated with performers Callie Day, Anna von Hausswolff, Lykke Li, Mariam Wallentin, Rosamund Pike, Black Sun Productions, Siri Karlsson (Cecilia Österholm, Maria Arnqvist), Lydia Lunch, Claire Chase, Joshua Rubin, Raehann Bryce-Davis, Blythe Gaissert, Amelia Watkins, Lauren Worsham, Eve Gigliotti, Isabel Leonard, John Kelly and Abby Fischer.
Mikael has released over twenty albums with works for orchestra and chamber ensembles, sound collages, dance scores, film music and experimental pop projects.
In 2007, Mikael was included in Out Magazine’s Out 100 list of influential people. The score to his piece Nasty Fucker was published in Butt Magazine. In 2012, NYC Public Radio’s listeners voted him as one of their 100 favorite classical composers under 40. In 2016, he was one of the hosts of the prestigious radio show “Sommar i P1” on Swedish National Radio. In 2023 he was listed third on OPUS magazine’s year end list of that year’s prominent people in classical music.
In 2025 he received the Otto and Catherine Brunson Luening Award “for a composer due wide recognition” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2014 he received the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond award “for an exceptional mid-career composer”, also from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2021 Alexander Ekman and Mikael were jointly awarded the Falstaff Prize for their work together over the past 10 years. In 2023 Alexander Ekman and Mikael received the Golden Prague Prize for their contributions to the performing arts on television. In 2024, Mikael received the TCO culture prize.
Mikael Karlsson lives in Brooklyn. He moved to New York from Sweden in 2000 and graduated Summa Cum Laude with departmental honors with a Master’s Degree in classical composition from the Aaron Copland School of Music in 2005. His teachers include Bruce Saylor, Edward Smaldone, Steven Osgood, and Tobias Picker.
In 2014 Mr. Karlsson founded his own production company, publishing company and record label, Rough State Sound.
