Born in Stockholm on 21st May 1933, he studied conducting with Igor Markevitch in Salzburg, before going on to study in Paris, where his teachers included Nadia Boulanger at the Conservatory. After returning to Sweden he worked for some time as Coach at the Stockholm Opera and then had a spell of teaching at the Malmö Conservatory. Meantime he also conducted the orchestra of Helsingborg City Theatre. Between 1963 and 1968 he was Director of Music at the Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. This was followed by another period of teaching, at the National College of Musical Drama (rehearsal, solfeggio and improvisation). He has made a distinguished career for himself as a conductor and arranger of the melo-poet Evert Taube’s songs. Among his most notable achievements are recordings of the orchestral compositions of Franz Berwald.
Ulf Björlin cherishes the element of artistic and elegant entertainment in the forms of serious music. Several of his works are music dramas and include both boisterously illustrative episodes and profoundly evocative ones. He has a cheerful, infectious sense of rhythm, and in his sense of melody shows an engaging capacity for lucidity of expression.
Björlin has also composed several works for off-stage performance. Fore most of these, perhaps, is his grandly conceived cantata Piae Cantiones et alterae cantiones Septentrionales, based on a bundle of tunes from the 16th century collection “Piae Cantiones“. This composition was first performed in the autumn of 1982. Ulf Björlin died in Palm Beach on 23 October 1993. H-GP