Andreas Brantelid is among Scandinavia's top cellists, with an impressive record of concerto appearances with major orchestras in many countries. He is also active as a chamber music player.
Brantelid was born on October 8, 1987, in Copenhagen, Denmark. His father gave him his first cello lessons, and he made such rapid progress that he was able to debut as a concerto soloist at age 14 with the
Royal Danish Orchestra, playing
Elgar's difficult Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85. Major prizes helped
Brantelid sustain the momentum he had built up as a prodigy. He won the Eurovision Young Musicians Contest in 2006 as a representative of Sweden, and he was Denmark Radio's Artist of the Year in 2007. In 2008, he received the prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, and he was part of the European Concert Organization's Rising Star Tour in 2008-2009. From 2008 to 2011,
Brantelid was a BBC New Generation Artist. The list of top orchestras with which
Brantelid has performed is long and varied, including the
London Philharmonic,
Seattle Symphony, and
NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, in addition to all the major orchestras in the Nordic countries. He has played under such conductors as
Vasily Petrenko,
Thomas Dausgaard, and
Sakari Oramo.
Brantelid is also an enthusiastic chamber player whose frequent collaborators include pianist
Bengt Forsberg and violinist
Nils-Erik Sparf. He has also played in a trio with violinist
Benjamin Schmid and pianist
Christian Ihle Hadland and performed with the likes of
Paul Badura-Skoda,
Joshua Bell, and
Daniel Barenboim.
Brantelid made his recording debut in 2008 on the EMI Classics label with a recording of
concertos by Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, and Schumann with the
Danish National Symphony Orchestra. He made several more recordings for EMI before moving to BIS in 2015 for a recording of
Grieg's Cello Sonata and Percy Grainger's Scandinavian Suite. After other chamber music recordings on BIS,
Brantelid and
Forsberg released the album
Russian Tales, featuring music by
Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Myaskovsky, on the Naxos label in 2020.