Born in Stockholm on 11th December 1939. She began taking piano lessons at the age of six and gave her first public performance two years later. Further studies followed with Gottfrid Boon at the State Academy of Music, Stockholm, and Ilona Kabos in London. She made her début at the age of sixteen, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 together with the Stockholm Philharmonic. This performance was such a success that she was elected “Artist of the Year“. Since then her career as a professional pianist has taken her on extensive tours of Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, but also to most of the European countries and to the USA, Latin America, the Soviet Union, the African countries, Israel, China and Japan. She has taken part in festivals in Moscow, Dubrovnik, Spoleto and Vienna, and she has given radio and television performances in several countries. She holds the Adelaide Ristori Award, presented by the Italian Government, and the Hungarian Béla Bartók Medal. She has been a piano teacher ever since the age of fifteen, and in 1977 she responded to what she felt to be the pressing need for a private music institution by personally founding the Nordic Music Conservatory in Österskär. She is Principal of the Institute and Senior Piano Teacher. Several young musicians have graduated from the Institute, and they have acquired a supplementary mission in Swedish music-making. In early years she studied harmony and counterpoint with Valdemar Söderholm, Hans Eppstein and Gunnar Bucht, and more recently she has studied composition and conducting with Gunno Södersten. She has made recordings as both pianist, conductor and composer, added to which she has published a book of memoirs entitled Rapsodi (1975).
It is only during the past decade that Inger Wikström has found time for composition. Apart from such works as a Ballad for piano Op. 13 (1982), her output mainly comprises vocal music, including about ten settings, Op. 10-12, of poems by Rilke. “To me the poetry of Rilke has come to be an entire philosophy, through his perception of our world on so many different levels and in so many different dimensions....“ She has also set poems by Pär Lagerkvist to music and she has written a two-act opera, based on Strindberg’s Den Fredlöse, first performed at Ulriksdal Palace Theatre in 1986. She was inspired not only by the Viking theme and the wealth of language but also by vigorous parts played by women.
An opera of a completely different kind is Junker Nils av Eka, Op. 14 (1982), to words by Astrid Lindgren, first performed by Folkoperan. The music, inspired by folk song, hit song and anthem, has evolved from her everyday work with children and young musicians attached to the Österskär Conservatory. SJ