Léonie Sonning Talent Prize recipient 2026
Violist
When Njord was three years old, he was the best violinist in the world – at least in his own mind. His first violin was made of cardboard, with a stick and an eraser serving as a bow, and on it he could play anything: the Mendelssohn concerto, Sibelius, all of it. Then Christmas Eve came, and with it a real violin. The disappointment was immense. Suddenly he could only produce squeaks and scratchy noises. “It has taken many years to build myself back up to the level I had on the cardboard violin,” Njord almost says, with a twinkle in his eye.
Njord grew up in central Oslo in a family where classical and contemporary music were a natural part of daily life. His mother is a violin teacher and his father a composer. The neighbour was a composer too, and every year he would give young Njord a new rock CD for his birthday – Genesis, Tenacious D and the like. So other genres made their way into his world as well.
As early as the age of six, Njord had his first string quartet. They called themselves the Dinosaur Quartet and initially consisted of three violins and a cello. After a couple of years they had reached a higher level and needed a viola in the sound picture, so Njord’s mother bought one for the quartet. The idea was that Njord and one of the other violinists would take turns playing it. But Njord is an only child and, as he himself admits, has never been especially good at sharing. So after a while he said, “No, I’ll take the viola, and you can play the violin.” And that is how it has been ever since.
The Dinosaur Quartet became the Rondo Quartet when they wanted to sound a little more professional, and the four friends played together for a full ten years. It was there that Njord’s love of chamber music was formed. “You create a completely different bond when you play together in such a close relationship. You can become extremely good friends without really having said a single word to one another,” he says.
During upper-secondary school, Njord took jazz piano as a secondary instrument and discovered Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. He also played bass guitar in a band whose school concert for a thousand children got off to a rather turbulent start when the bass turned out to be tuned a semitone too low. The audience booed, and his rock career came to an abrupt end.
In 2020, Njord was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he studied with the renowned violist Kim Kashkashian. Because of the pandemic, the first semester took place via Zoom from Oslo late into the night, before he was finally able to travel to the United States.
In Boston he shared a flat with the Danish cellist Jonathan Swensen, and the two of them spent countless evenings jamming and improvising to their neighbours’ mild despair – a period that one year resulted in what Njord calls a passive-aggressive Christmas present: a clock.
After four years in Boston, Njord moved to Copenhagen, where he is now pursuing his master’s degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Music with Asbjoern Noergaard of the Danish String Quartet as his teacher. There he has found a more focused environment and time for both viola and composition.
For Njord, composition is not a side activity but an equally important part of his artistic work. His father never taught him to compose, but he did teach him how to notate beautifully, with precise instructions about which pen thickness belongs to noteheads, stems and bar lines. The rest Njord has explored on his own, inspired by composers such as Ligeti, Berio and the Nordic contemporary music tradition he grew up with.
Njord’s compositions use microtonality, overtones and unconventional techniques to create sounds rarely heard in classical concerts. For his bachelor’s concert in Boston, he wrote a solo work for viola and electronics in which he could trigger pre-processed tapes with a pedal, allowing them to merge with the acoustic sound. It is a direction he wants to develop further. “I feel that electronics and classical music do not have to be two different worlds. I think you can weave them together and find new forms of expression that make people think about music in a different way,” says Njord.
The future, for him, is about travelling more, playing chamber music at festivals around the world and continuing to compose. Njord dreams of never being defined as one type of musician. As he puts it: “I hope I get to do as many different things as possible.”
