Léonie Sonning Talent Prize recipient 2026
String Quartet
When the cellist Kristian and the violist Oscar were living together on Monbijougatan in Malmoe, they could hardly have imagined that the street’s name would one day appear on concert posters across Scandinavia. Monbijou – French for “my jewel” – is named after a now-vanished palace in Berlin, and the four Swedes thought it sounded international and had a beautiful ring to it. The fact that it also echoed the names of the great French quartets was an added bonus. That is how Monbijou Quartet came into being.
The four members have known each other for more than ten years. The brothers Alexander and Kristian Hencz Chojecki both grew up in Gothenburg in a musical family where both parents are violinists. Oscar Edin is also from Gothenburg and met the brothers in a youth orchestra around 2010. Marcus Backerud, the quartet’s second violinist, got to know the others a couple of years later. The musical world in Sweden is not that large, as Kristian observes, so you keep running into one another.
It was at the end of 2022 that the four friends decided to take the plunge. A Swedish chamber music competition, Ung och Lovande, had an approaching deadline, and that was the external occasion for sending off an application. They won, and the first prize was impossible to turn down: a five-week tour with thirty-five concerts across Sweden. After that, there was nothing to do but continue.
The tour took the quartet from Lund in the south to Skellefteaa in the north, and gave them a level of routine no rehearsal room can replace. In small places such as Tingsryd, they encountered a surprisingly active chamber music scene and an enthusiastic audience. Elsewhere they played to just five listeners in a large hall, where the organiser said goodbye with the words, “Lock the door behind you when you’re finished.”
Along the way, they recorded every concert and listened back in the car while driving to the next destination. The same programme, evening after evening, was refined and transformed. “You gain an incredible sense of security from that,” they say. “When we walk on stage, we know this is going to be good.”
One of the best anecdotes from the tour comes from the small town of Ljusdal north of Gavle. After the concert, the quartet made its way to the only open pizzeria, Rio Grande, where the local young people were also spending the evening. A girl asked them whether they were in a band. They were happy to confirm that, without specifying what kind, and invited her to the next day’s concert in Gavle.
Sure enough, she turned up with a friend, both dressed in black hard-rock clothes and each holding a beer, ready for a rock show. Instead, they entered a church filled with pensioners. But they stayed. They listened to the whole concert, had coffee during the interval with the elderly ladies, and thought it was fantastic. It was the first time they had ever been to a classical concert.
When Monbijou Quartet goes on stage, it does so in patent leather shoes. It began because Alexander simply did not own an ordinary pair of black shoes, and it has remained that way ever since. The shoes have become a trademark, one that especially older audience members comment on with delight.
But it is not only the shoes that create a sense of closeness. The quartet speaks a great deal to its audience, introduces the works and breaks down the barrier that an elevated stage can create. “We try to make it feel as though everyone is in the same room. That creates an attentiveness that is good both for us and for the audience,” they explain.
All four members also work in symphony and opera orchestras around the Nordic region, and they see that breadth of experience and expression as a strength in the quartet. On the other hand, it requires logistics when they live in different cities and have to plan every gathering months in advance. But when they do meet, the work is efficient and focused, and their ambitions are considerable: a debut at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, an upcoming release featuring living Swedish composers, and participation in international competitions. So the funds that accompany the Leonie Sonning Talent Prize come at exactly the right moment for the band’s coffers.
