Born in Luleå on 1st December 1944. He entered the State Academy of Music, Stockholm, in 1965 and studied the piano, viola and flute. He has been conductor at the Stockholm Opera since 1972, and has also performed as a visiting conductor with most of the Swedish symphony orchestras and at the Drottningholm Theatre and Vadstena Academy, as well as internationally.
During the 1980s, Björn Hallman has made a name for himself as a composer of wide-ranging accomplishments. This reputation began with a Mass for soprano, oboe, organ and choir, performed in the Vatican, but the real incentive for writing music was provided by a practical situation. When planning concerts for children he found that the repertoire was very limited, and so he offered to write music for the Snow White Story (1981). The result was an unqualified success, and the music has since been performed by several orchestras in Sweden and elsewhere, e.g. on Dutch and British radio and on Norwegian television. After this success, and moreover considering the great importance which he attaches to children’s music, it is not surprising that he should subsequently have produced more works of the same kind: a colourful, vigorous and distinctive instrumental demonstration to illustrate fairy tales like Niklas Piccolas Vänner (1983, with more than a hundred performances in Sweden, Estonia and Norway), Pomperipossa (1984, based on a story by the Swedish writer Falstaff Fakir and successfully performed in both the USSR and the USA), Pomperipossas syster (1985, a children’s opera for cast and participating audience, to words by Birgitta Ribbegren) and Circus (1987). He has also written stage music for adults.
Incidental music apart, Hallman has also written a great deal of symphonic music, chamber music and songs. His Clarinet Concerto (1983) commissioned and first per formed by the Göteborg Symphony Orchestra, is characterised by the composer as a “Spanish night with blinds drawn“. The profoundly moving song cycle Kalejdoskop (1984) for contralto and orchestra employs a tonal language which at times reminds one of the introspection of the late compositions of Shostakovitch. Björn Hallman is a composer currently passing through a process of both rapid and exciting development. SJ