Leif Strand

About Leif Strand

Leif Strand was a Swedish conductor, composer and arranger whose choral ensembles became a fixture of the country's musical life for over half a century. Born in Bengtsfors in 1942, he trained at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm between 1960 and 1970, studying clarinet for five years and conducting for three. In 1965 he founded the Leif Strand Chamber Choir, followed in 1997 by a women's choir bearing his name, and from 1995 he made his home in Bovallstrand on the west coast of Sweden. Over the course of his career he worked alongside leading figures of Swedish jazz and popular music, including Jan Johansson, Georg Riedel, Arne Domnérus, Janne Schaffer and Björn J:son Lindh, and produced roughly thirty recordings as composer, arranger and choir director, among them choral works, masses and symphonic compositions released between 1971 and 2020. His contribution to Swedish musical life was recognised with the State's Lifelong Artist Stipend in 1994 and the Gothenburg Culture Prize in 2002. Strand died on 1 December 2021, remembered as a versatile musician who moved comfortably between choral tradition, jazz and popular idioms, and whose choirs carried his musical vision across generations of singers.