Léonie Sonning Talent Prize recipient 2026
Guitarist
It all began during an autumn holiday on Laesoe, in Ophelia’s grandmother’s house. Ophelia Sangill was eight years old and had been playing the violin for three years, but something was missing. Her father, himself a classical guitarist trained at the conservatoire, was sitting there practising, and Ophelia was allowed to borrow his guitar. There were more strings, there were frets on the fingerboard, and there was much more sound. “I just remember that it felt easier, and I thought it was the coolest thing to play big chords,” she recalls.
In reality, the classical guitar had been part of Ophelia’s life long before she ever took it in her own hands. When her mother sat in the front row at her father’s final conservatoire recital in 1998, she was pregnant with Ophelia. The apple did not fall far from the tree, and when Ophelia many years later gave her own final recital, she thought about the fact that her father had stood on the same stage twenty-five years earlier.
The family home was filled with music in every genre. Her parents introduced Ophelia to everything from Pink Floyd, Mew and Dizzy Mizz Lizzy to Genesis and Sneakers, and that breadth has remained with her.
After a year of upper-secondary school in Frederiksvaerk, Ophelia found herself at a crossroads when the family was about to move to Bagsvaerd. She chose music. She dropped out of school and applied for the pre-college programme. “I was just really bad at school. It did not mean anything to me. Music, on the other hand, always has, so I knew that I had to do something with music,” she says frankly. Her parents supported her without reservation.
Three years of pre-college training led to admission to the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where Ophelia completed both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical guitar and later the advanced soloist programme. During the second year of her bachelor’s degree, she wrote her first major work, Taet Paa, for guitar and voice. It was an attempt to use all the techniques she had mastered on the guitar and place her own voice on top of them. “It punctured a hole in everything else I have done since,” she says.
Her teacher Jesper Sivbaek has supported that direction from the outset. For Ophelia, it is about finding her own expression, not about fitting into a genre. When she composes, she does not think in theoretical terms. She listens her way forward, finds a groove or a melody, and builds from there. She loves retuning the guitar so that the open strings suddenly resonate in new ways and the entire instrument is reset. “Then you are not thinking in keys. You are just using your ears.”
Ophelia began writing pop songs at the age of fourteen, but has since moved in a very different direction, where the techniques of the classical guitar meet singing, rhythmic grooves and expansive sound worlds. She has released the EP Dimensions and written a work for twenty guitars for the conservatoire’s guitar ensemble – a major challenge for someone who normally keeps all her music in her head and never writes it down.
She has now started the band PROJECT: Melange together with her partner Ludvig on guitar, a percussionist from the conservatoire, and her younger brother on synth. Here Ophelia stands with a guitar strapped over her shoulder instead of sitting down in the classical manner. It is a new context, but it is still a classical musician who is playing. At her debut concert in 2026, she wants to show both sides: one half with solo classical guitar and one half with the band. Two sides of the same musician.
