Léonie Sonning Talent Prize recipient 2026
Organist
Isak Birkemose does not come from a musical family. It was he himself who, at the age of three, became captivated by a violinist at a free Sunday concert in Frederiksberg Church and told his parents that he wanted to do that too. After some persistence, he was allowed to begin, and at four he started playing the violin. It was always meant to be the violin that would accompany him through life. But that is not how it turned out.
While attending the pre-college programme with violin as his main subject, Isak almost accidentally met the organist Hans Ole Thers in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Copenhagen. He invited Isak upstairs to see the organ, and instantly this was another world entirely. Stop knobs, swell box – and then there was the fact that one also had to play with one’s feet. “It was obvious straight away that you have to know an enormous amount about the instrument in order to use it,” Isak says. Shortly afterwards, Covid struck, and suddenly he had time for both: violin in the living room during the day, organ in the church in the evening. What began as a lockdown project eventually took over.
When the time came to apply to the conservatoire, Isak therefore found himself having to choose. He still loved the violin, but he could feel that the life of an organist pulled at him more strongly. Not just because of the instrument itself, but also because of the environment around it. “In the violin world, you can really sense a spirit of competition. But when you met other organists, you could relax. You simply thrived,” he explains. So the organ it became.
Since taking up the organ, Isak has become absorbed by a discipline that is almost unique to organists in the classical world: improvisation. At first he did not think it was for him. But a fellow student showed him a few tricks and explained it so well that the spark was lit.
For Isak, improvisation is about becoming one with your instrument. “If you only ever play repertoire, and someone says: couldn’t you just play something? then you may end up saying no, because you do not have your score with you. But if you are truly one with your instrument, then the answer is always yes,” as he puts it. He compares it to driving a car: at first you think about every gear change, but eventually the turns live in your muscle memory and come by themselves.
It is precisely improvisation that has brought Isak to Paris as part of his education. In France, improvisation is a much stronger tradition than it is in Denmark. One reason is the Catholic liturgy, where the procession into the church always requires improvised music because no one knows how long it will take. And then there are the French organs built by Aristide Cavaille-Coll, which Isak calls the organ’s answer to Stradivarius. The organ in Saint-Sulpice, which still stands in its original state, is for him the greatest in the world.
Isak’s background as a violinist and as a singer in the Copenhagen Boys’ Choir still informs the way he sits at the organ. A professor once remarked that Isak phrased in a particular way, and when he thought about it, he realised that he was instinctively following the bowing distribution that would feel natural on a violin. And from the choir he has a physical sense of when one needs to breathe. “The organ can play forever, until someone switches off the power. But you still have to remember the good breaths,” he says.
His dream for the future is a life with many elements: a part-time post in a church with the Sunday high mass as its centre, teaching at every level, and concerts. He also misses the practice flow of his violin days, when one could get up, make a cup of coffee, play for a bit, make another coffee and play a little more. For organists it is different. You depend on available churches and practice rooms, and Isak has spent many late evening hours alone in a church. That is why he dreams of a practice organ in his living room, and part of the Leonie Sonning Talent Prize will therefore be used for exactly that.
