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The Finnish mezzo-soprano and artistic director, Wivan Nygård-Fagerudd, grew up in the archipelago Raippaluoto in Korsholm Municipality and began even as a student working as a music critic and cultural journalist for Hufvudstadsbladet. She studied at the opera department at the Sibelius Academy,
obtaining her diploma in singing in 1995 and her Masters Degree in 1998. She had also private singing studies with Professor Dorothy Irving and Jeffrey Goldberg, and studies of Baroque interpretation of Lena Susanne Norin and Mark Tatlow.
Wivan Nygård-Fagerudd belonged to the Finnish Radio Chamber Choir from 1987 to 1991, and has been a soloist with the Finska radions symfoniorkester (Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra), Sinfonia Lahti (Lahti Symphony Orchestra), Åbo filharmoniker (Turku Philharmonic Orchestra), Mellersta Österbottens kammarorkester (Central Ostrobothnia Chamber Orchestra), Kymi Sinfonietta, Pori Sinfonietta, and city orchestras in Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Kuopio, Seinäjoki, Uleåborg, Vasa and Villmanstrand. She has performed operatic roles such as Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Dorabella in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, Suzuki in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, Jenny in Weill's Mahagonny and Elisa in Ahlfor’s Stulen lycka (Stolen Happiness).
Since 1997, Wivan Nygård-Fagerudd has worked, beside her singing enagements, as a program presenter and artistic director on a freelance basis for YLE/FST, and in recent years even with a number of her own documentary projects. Cross-cutting themes in her television shows and documentaries have been the culture, music and history. Among her television programs were Tid och rum (Time and space) (1999-2001), Alla tiders ting (All-time thing) (2003) and Meistersinger (2007). She is Chairman of the Council of the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland. In the parliamentary elections in 2007, she was elected 116 in the roster, and was first alternate for the Swedish People's Party in Vaasa constituency. |
