From farm girl to star soprano soloist to chief executive of one of her country’s major cultural institutions: Susanne Rydén’s career path has been anything but typical. But in September last year, she tells me, when she took on the tongue-twisting role of Executive Director and CEO of the Stockholm Konserthuset Foundation and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, she felt completely ready. “Everything I’ve done in my life, I think, led up to this position in one way or another.”
“My early relationship with the Konserthuset was when I was a student at the Royal College here in Stockholm – we did Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. So I experienced standing at the choir balcony and singing in this hall. I’ve experienced being in the very front as a soloist with the orchestra. I’ve also been an external event manager for the Birgit Nilsson prize and other events. I’ve gotten to know this house throughout my life, from all sides. This view from various angles of the house has served me well where I am now, and I can understand the everyday work of someone who spends their life on stage.”
Rydén’s earliest experiences of music came courtesy of the organist and leader of the church choir in her village. But her true moment of Pauline conversion came later – and not in Sweden – when she was 17. “I did an exchange year in the US. I stayed with relatives outside Chicago, and that was a kind of breaking point. I would go, on my own, into Chicago to the Symphony, hearing Solti conducting pieces like Brahms 4. That was my first exposure to symphonic music, and it was fantastic: I can still feel it. Then I had violin lessons with a great teacher; I had my first proper high quality singing lessons; I played the piano. So I was just marinated in music on a different level than before, and that was when I decided that this would be my way.”
I ask whether the Konserthuset board gave her a particular brief as incoming CEO. Unsurprisingly, given the harmonious 21-year tenure of her predecessor Stefan Forsberg, the essence of the brief was to maintain continuity. But Rydén is emphatic that in addition to maintaining quality, her driving passion will be “to open the house, to reach audiences, to reach people that we don’t necessarily reach in the way we want to today.” Perhaps because of the early memories of not having been a classical music listener, it’s a subject that she keeps returning to through our interview.
The Konserthuset celebrates its 100th anniversary next year. “It was built for the orchestra”, Rydén explains, “and it was built for the Nobel Prize presentation. But it was also to help Stockholm rise up to an international standard, to put culture and music into the centre of Stockholm, to reach more people. We have now received a wonderful donation which will enable us to do an outdoor renovation, so the house will be beautiful from the outside, just as we open our anniversary season. But to me, it’s not about just making the surface wonderful, it’s about making our hall and our building even more inviting, so that more people are attracted, so that we can open it up even more.”
“I’m not in favour of just preserving things. We always need to be developing and reacting to our times. We need to look at various formats. When do people want to come to a concert? What time of day, how long should it be? We need to find a way to both protect the listeners that want something similar to today, but also to add others. We like this house to be an open house, to feel that it’s bustling with energy as much as possible.”
With over 1,100 events a year, the Konserthuset’s programme is busy. “But this can also be a place where, after the concert, you stay for a while, maybe have a drink,” Rydén says, “chat with new friends or old friends, and just hang around a little longer to share the experience that you just had. We can see from our analysis that we have gaps for certain ages. We have classical music for children, but very little for parents with kids between one and three, so we are persuing that. And we are also starting a youth council for age 15 to 21, inviting young people who are curious.”
Of course, reaching more people can be done both by bringing people into the hall and by bringing the musicians out to the people. Some of this is to be achieved by conventional means – pop-up concerts, summer concerts (“We have huge outdoor concerts. We’ve been doing that for many years, and we are going to do another soon, in an area a bit further outside, where we have a lot of diverse population”). But Rydén also emphasises the importance of their digital tools – most notably the video platform Konserthuset Play – as a way of “putting classical music into other situations in society”. As an example, she hopes to work with hospitals to replace the commercial TV in their waiting rooms with music from the RSPO.
Rydén had a distinguished career as a soprano soloist, singing across the world with the great names in Early Music and recording multiple albums. But Early Music’s infrastructure pales in comparison to that of the major classical music institutions, and increasingly, Rydén found herself turning from a freelance singer into a music entrepreneur. “I’ve started festivals, I’ve run a lot of major events on quite a large scale and developed them from an idea to a successful event. At some point, I found myself working with all these ideas and initiatives. They were successful and they took more of my time”. Eventually, she concluded that this was to be her career and that she did not want to continue performing “in a deteriorating way” from the high level she had reached.
That led to two big jobs: CEO of Musik i Syd, the organisation responsible for live music in the southern regions of Kronoberg and Skåne (which includes Malmö), and president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, an institution at arm’s length from government which “aims to promote the art of music and musical life” in the country. These are overtly political roles – the kind of thing that would have the average musician running for the hills – so I ask Rydén if the politics of persuading sometimes-reluctant people about the value of music is something that excites her. “It is, actually. I think you have to enjoy it in order to be believed in, and there is nothing that I can be more passionate about than music and the language of music, how music connects people, how important it is for children to experience music at an early stage and to have it as a companion for life.”
Compared to the UK, where few of our lawmakers are classical music devotees (with our current prime minister being an honourable exception), the picture in Sweden is more mixed, she says. But hesitant or not, Swedish lawmakers get an enforced annual dose: the day the new government takes office concludes with a concert at the Konserthuset where the full cabinet is present. This year’s will be the first one for which Rydén will play the host. “I will be the guide through the concert, and this is at least one time a year when we have the full government here and we can present the best of the best to them. It’s an hour of enjoyment for them – but it’s also an hour of learning, because they are bound to hear music that they haven’t heard before.” And whenever there is a funding meeting at the Konserthuset, she makes sure that music is part of the experience. “When I take a politician in to listen when we have thousands of schoolchildren in the hall, having classical music performed for them, it takes away any barrier and that says more than any words I could say.”
Rydén is on friendly terms with her predecessor, with whom she has essentially swapped jobs (Forsberg having taken over the presidency of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music). When she took over the role, I ask, did Forsberg have any advice for her? The concise answer comes with a broad grin: “Lift every stone and don’t look back.”
See our complete guide to the Konserthuset Stockholm.
This article was sponsored by Konserthuset Stockholm Foundation.
