Denmark’s brand-new Olesen Music Award was founded to recognize exceptional young classical musicians with the artistic vision and international potential to shape the future of classical music. Funded by the Erik & Susanna Olesen Charitable Foundation, the prize will be given biennially to early-career musicians.

Cellist and VC Artist Jonathan Swensen has been named as the inaugural recipient. He receives a cash prize of DKK 500,000 (approximately $78,000 USD), and will also receive enhanced networking with concert halls and orchestras across the Nordic region that will strengthen his reputation.

A recipient of the 2022 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Swensen won joint First Prize at the 2024 Naumburg International Cello Competition.

He has appeared as a soloist with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra, New England Conservatory Philharmonia, Orquesta Ciudad de Granada, Copenhagen Philharmonic, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, Odense Symphony Orchestra, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, the NFM Leopoldinum in a play-direct program, Mobile Symphony, and the Greenville Symphony.

Swensen released his debut album Fantasia, an album of works for solo cello, on the Champs Hill Records label in 2022. The disc features music by Kodály, Khachaturian, Ligeti, and Dutilleux, as well as Bent Sørensen’s Farewell Fantasia, which was composed for Swensen and premiered in 2021.

A graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Swensen continued his studies with Torleif Thedéen at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, and Laurence Lesser at the New England Conservatory, where he received his Artist Diploma in May 2023.

“For me, receiving the Olesen Music Award is an enormous vote of confidence,” Swensen says.

“It feels as though there are people who genuinely believe in me and want to help me. Music has the power to develop us as human beings, and the opportunity to reach more people through the Olesen Music Award is fantastic – and something I am incredibly grateful for.”

“Jonathan Swensen has a remarkable ability to make the music his own,” adds Stine Hasbirk, chair of the Olesen Music Award, violist, and member of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.

“He possesses extraordinary technical freedom, but technique is never the point – the music and its story always come first. He plays with an energy, intensity and immediacy that can create those rare moments when an audience loses all sense of time and place.”