“Erik Söderblom is perhaps the most brilliant Finnish opera director of our time. His solutions are always functioning, stemming from the inner conditions of the work. They are also lively and spiritual, impressing, funny and startling, and they serve the audience in all possible ways.”
Matti Lehtonen, Turun Sanomat
Erik Söderblom is a festival director, stage director, pedagogue, script writer and a public advocate of the art.
One of the most powerful forces in the Finnish performing arts scene, Erik was born into a Swedish speaking, well-known artistic family (his father Ulf Söderblom served 30 years as the Chief Conductor of the Finnish National Opera and is a founder of the Savonlinna Opera Festival) and has played piano and cello since childhood. He studied philosophy and arts in University of Helsinki; continued theatre studies at Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London; and opera directing at the Hochshule für Musik in Munich in the class of the legendary August Everding, with a special talent scholarship of Henrik Steffens Foundation. Erik returned to Finland to attend the directors’ class of the Theatre Academy of Helsinki; and holds a master’s degree in arts. During those years (1982-1985), Erik also conducted Chamber Strings of Helsinki. With this ensemble he created his very first festival, a week of concerts, commemorating the 300th anniversary of the birth of J.S.Bach. The festival laid the ground for the highly acclaimed baroque style being played in Finland.
From 1988 to 1990 Erik worked as Director at the Turku City Theatre. In 1990, he - together with a group of young and talented actors, directors, writers and set designers of his generation - started up the Q-teatteri Helsinki and developed it as a bearer of the progressive and radical impulse.With Q-teatteri he made an acknowledged series of productions of both newly written Finnish texts and classical texts such as Dostoevsky’s Writings from the Cellar, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Twelfth Night and Tolstoi’s War and Peace. All of these productions have been shown in festivals in Finland and abroad. Q-teatteriis recognized as one of the leading theatre companies of Finland. He was the Chairman of the Board and Artistic Leader between 1996 and 2002.
On Erik’s initiative, Q-teatteri founded the Baltic Circle, a network for free theatre groups around the Baltic Sea. In 2000 he developed the network further into Baltic Circle Theatre Festival; and as the festival´s first Artistic Director set the vision for its future development. The Baltic Circle Festival, today, is an internationally recognized festival for contemporary theatre and performing arts. Erik has, in addition to his artistic achievements, contributed to Finnish theatre as an important pedagogue. In 1998, he founded a legendary music theatre class at Turku Polytechnic; and in 2000 he took up the position as Professor of Acting at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. In the years 2005 to 2009, alongside his professorship, he worked as Vice-Rector for this university, contributing to the strategy for restructuring the main art schools of Finland - the Theatre Academy, the Academy of Fine Arts and the Sibelius Academy - to form University of the Arts Helsinki.
In 2009 Erik was appointed Artistic Director and CEO of the Helsinki Festival. The Helsinki Festival, running since 1968, operates under the auspices of the Helsinki Events Foundation, established by the City of Helsinki. The festival programme features classical and world music, theatre, dance, circus and visual arts as well as a range of urban events. During his leadership, concluded in October 2015, the Helsinki Festival developed to be one of the most outstanding festivals of Europe, and also became the biggest multi-disciplinary art happening in the Nordic countries by generating a budget growth of 20% and increasing its audience by 25% (300 000 attendance annually).
Erik has made his mark in the festival’s history and development with noteworthy extensions to the programme. He not only considerably widened the scope of the festival by creating city events with tens of thousands of participants but also enabled annual visits of world top-class orchestras to Helsinki by successfully negotiating funds. In his final edition in 2015, he curated a special country focus, Focus China, which was the most extensive display of Chinese art and culture ever seen in the Nordic countries. Sponsored by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture rather than by the Chinese government, the programme offered a broad spectrum of drama, dance, music, films, photography, installations and new media art and made a total of 500 Chinese artists’ work visible in Helsinki. The Helsinki Festival has been honored with the EFFE Label since 2015.
In 2015 Erik, with the aim of responding to the drastic demographic shift in the Finnish society, became in-house artistic partner at MiklagardArts, a self-funded, independent cultural operator, facilitator of artistic interventions and an advocate for diversity, equity, inclusivity & internationalization in the Finnish art scene.
In 2016, he was invited to become a curating member of the Artistic Committee at the most prominent international performing arts festival in Finland, the Tampere Theatre Festival,
Since 2017, Erik has been working as the Artistic Director of Espoo City Theatre. The theatre located in the capital area of the country, produces its own performances and annually invites 15-20 guest performances from all parts of the world, thus becoming more relevant and accessible for its audience with a growing diverse cultural background. Erik, with the Cultural Department of the City of Espoo, is creating the strategy for a new theatre building to be opened in 2027. He actively promotes co-creation with the Aalto University and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern to focus on anti-disciplinary artistic expressions and methods, and also on confrontation of arts, artificial intelligence and extended reality.
With a history of more than 100 premiered drama and opera productions, Erik is recognized not only as an important theatre director but also as one of the most distinguished opera directors of his country. He has directed performances such as the prize-winning productions of Mozart´s Entführung aus dem Serail and Le Nozze di Figaro at Pori Opera, Don Giovanni for Helsinki Festival and the huge outdoor performance of Wagner´s Der fliegende Holländer in Turku with top ranked singers such as Juha Uusitalo, Matti Salminen, Päivi Nisula and Jorma Silvasti. As a trained musician, he has the ability to read also intricate contemporary music scores and has realized the world premieres of several Finnish operas such as Tapio Tuomela´s Mothers and Daughters, Lars Karlsson´s Rödhamn and Mikko Heiniö´s The Hour of the Serpent, all at the Finnish National Opera; and Veli-Matti Puumala´s Anna Liisa for the Helsinki Festival.
Outstanding among his works are the staging of J.S Bach´s St John´s Passion with Helsinki Baroque Orchestra; and the semi-concertante performance of Shostakovich’s long-forgotten opera parody Orango for Helsinki Festival, with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. He presented his artistic farewell as the Artistic Director for Helsinki Festival with a widely praised semi-staged production of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck with Florian Boesch and Karita Mattila singing the lead roles. Erik, in 2019, successfully brought to the stage, Juhani Nuorvala´s and Juha Siltanen´s FLASH FLASH - the two deaths of Andy Warhol, one of the most strikingly unconventional contemporary music theatre compositions in the recent decades of Finnish music.
Erik takes a keen interest in history, and this allowed him to write the manuscript for the 4-part television series “The Activists” produced by the Finnish National Broadcasting Company YLE in 2019.
Amongst his many roles is that of mentor to a number of young artists, directors and festival professionals in Finland and abroad. In this capacity he collaborated with the European Festivals’ Association for the Festival Readings in Sochi in 2016.
He served in various committees for appointing professors and lecturers for the Nordic theatre academies; is an expert-consultant for the Stina Krook Foundation and a member of the Delegation for the Swedish Cultural Foundation.
Erik is also a member of the European House for Culture since 2016.
In 2018 Erik was made a “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government.
He speaks Swedish (mother tongue) and Finnish and has full professional proficiency in English and German as well as elementary proficiency in Norwegian, Danish, French, Italian, Estonian and Turkish.