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Sven-Ingvart Mikkelsen
Professor and Head of Department for Organ and Church Music The Royal Danish Academy of Music


The organist Sven-Ingvart Mikkelsen (b. 1955) is one of the most versatile musicians on the Danish organ scene, and already at his debut in 1982 he attracted attention with a concert program with important German and French organ classics.

Sven-Ingvart is a graduate of the music conservatories in Esbjerg and Copenhagen, and he has supplemented with studies in Vienna with Prof. Michael Radulescu, and in Paris with the organists Marie-Claire Alain and André Isoir.

Sven-Ingvart's work as an organist is characterized by a great curiosity to try out new ways of composing a concert program and to find new ways of playing together with other musicians, and this curiosity and musical joy he wants to pass on to the next generations of organists through his teaching. In addition, he has a great interest in organ building, historical organs and in general a penchant for narrow, unexplored topics in organ history, which i.a. is expressed in his research and publications.

Sven-Ingvart Mikkelsen is Professor and Head of Department for Organ, Church Music and Early Music at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He has previously been employed as an organist at Løgumkloster Church and Frederiksborg Castle Church and as a teacher at music conservatories in Esbjerg and Copenhagen. He has also held courses, lectures and masterclasses at conservatories and music colleges in Denmark and abroad.

The French baroque music and its liturgical place side by side with Gregorian chant have fascinated Sven-Ingvart to such an extent that he has researched a stylistic performance of the Gregorian chant in polyphonic baroque style. This work is documented in CD releases with organ works by Couperin, Guilain and de Grigny as well as the book "Plainsong and French Baroque".

Sven-Ingvart has an extensive concert activity with concerts in a large number of European countries as well as North and South America and Asia.

His musical curiosity, has i.a. led to the discovery of J.A. Scheibe's organ sonatas, which he has documented with both a CD recording and the release of the sheet music. He has composed concert programs of a more experimental kind, such as music for organ and the Breton folk music instrument Bombarde, and he has played a large number of concerts with the violinist Jochen Brusch with a constellation of classical music and "classical" arrangements of symphonic rock classics (see www.retrorock.dk)

Sven-Ingvart’s latest project is a program with Bach and Rock for solo Organ. Here, the connection between Bach and Rock is underlined by a direct interweaving of rock music with quotations from JS Bach, with the result that the music flows together in a patchwork of baroque organ, Bach and symphonic rock. The program is called “STAIRWAY to BACH – Rock classics with a hint of Bach” (see https://www.ourrecordings.com/albums/stairway-to-bach and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KahuLZm0x9U )


www.si-mikkelsen.dk    -    organistmikkelsen@gmail.com   -   +45 40 87 74 52