Léonie Sonning Talent Prize recipient 2026
Tenor
When the Most family gathers for Christmas lunch, things really get wild. They sing each other into the ground. Who can sing the loudest, who has the best high C of the day. Gustav remembers how an English boyfriend of one of his cousins was completely traumatised by the inferno of sound that hit him when he was first invited to a Most family gathering.
The joy of singing comes from Gustav’s grandparents. All four of them were schoolteachers, but also active amateur musicians and choir conductors. His maternal grandfather Ole Most in particular had a singing voice that, according to the family, was so powerful that as a young man he was engaged to sing for the Danish Deaf Association so that they could feel the vibrations in the room. A small man with a very large voice. When Gustav many years later passed his bachelor’s exam at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Southern Denmark, his examiner Alice Granum said that it was a pleasure finally to examine a Most voice. So apparently it was a well-known phenomenon.
Despite all that singing joy, Gustav is the only one in the family to have become a professional singer. There is no shortage of musicians in the family, including his brother Valdemar, who is a pianist and also a Sonning Talent Prize recipient, but Gustav alone has taken on the life of a professional singer. Grandfather Ole would have been proud. He shed a tear when Gustav’s partner Katinka, herself a soprano, joined in the singing at a family gathering for the first time: “The family has gained a soprano!” he said joyfully.
Gustav grew up in Nyborg and attended an entirely ordinary state school. At first he played the trumpet and electric guitar, later the drums, and threw himself into everything from jazz to death metal. For as long as he can remember, he has also had a special ability to become someone else. As a boy visiting a bird sanctuary, he decided that he himself was an eagle and spent the next many hours bent forward staring at the ground instead of looking at the birds. And ever since, he has loved imitating voices. Even today he will happily take over a friend’s phone and continue the conversation in their voice, often with great success.
His brief career as a church singer at the age of twelve, when he was hired as the only bass in a church choir, gave him his first taste of professional life. “But a good voice is not everything. The fact that I overslept several Sunday services was not especially helpful,” he admits. Singing was then set aside until the chamber choir at Sankt Annae Gymnasium reawakened it during his upper-secondary years. There he discovered the classical use of the voice, and one evening at the Royal Danish Theatre sealed his fate: Wagner’s Lohengrin. “I disappeared completely into that universe. The sonic world, the harmonies, the use of the voice, the poetic dimension. That was when the penny dropped.”
Gustav applied to the Frederiksberg pre-college programme in his final year of school and gained a foundation he still draws on. Since then, he has spread his education across four conservatoires in three countries: the Royal Danish Academy of Music and the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Southern Denmark, as well as the conservatoires in Stuttgart and Vienna. All along the way, he has followed an early piece of advice from his singing teacher Jens Soendergaard: be your own singing teacher. “It has given me an independence that I value enormously. Always registering what feels good, what does not feel good. Listening to recordings. Can it sound more beautiful?”
In 2022 Gustav moved to Vienna to study for his master’s degree. He politely describes the apartment he moved into as a hole. But at the same time, he was engaged at the Vienna State Opera as Lehrbub in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and quickly discovered that the opera house offered both a sofa, a shower and an excellent canteen. For the first three months in Vienna, he effectively lived at the State Opera. “I have also been caught more than once with only a towel around my waist after taking a shower. But at least no one has blocked my card yet.”
Gustav is also a quiet rebel. He almost always sings concerts in a blazer and T-shirt rather than white tie and tails, and he inhabits the text with facial expression and gesture even when singing lieder. “I do wonder why, in 2026, we still stand with one hand on the piano and a stiff gaze out into the air while singing incredibly emotional Schubert songs.” For him, acting has to be part of it, regardless of genre. And the childhood gift for imitation has become a tool: “If you can imitate, you can also imitate a productive way of singing and make it your own.”
