Swedish Radio Choir Names Latvia's Krista Audere as Next Chief

The Swedish Radio Choir has appointed Krista Audere as its next chief conductor. Audere, a 37-year-old conductor from Latvia, currently works in the Netherlands, where she is about to take up the position of artistic leader and chief conductor of Cappella Amsterdam.

The Stockholm-based ensemble announced that its search for a new leader had crossed the Baltic, settling on a Latvian chief for one of Europe's most storied professional choirs.

The Swedish Radio Choir was founded in 1925, alongside the radio service itself. It remains one of the continent's flagship vocal ensembles, an institution built on close association with broadcasting from its inception.

Much of the choir's international reputation rests on the tenure of Eric Ericson, who led the ensemble from 1952 to 1982 and shaped a sound that became a benchmark for choral singing across Europe and beyond. Every conductor who has followed has worked in the shadow of that three-decade legacy.

Audere's appointment links that heritage to a new generation of Baltic choral leadership. Latvia's choral tradition is among the deepest in Europe, and the appointment of a 37-year-old Latvian to the Swedish Radio Choir's top post signals the ensemble's continued reliance on the Nordic-Baltic axis that has long defined its identity.

She arrives with a dual mandate. In the Netherlands, she is about to become artistic leader and chief conductor of Cappella Amsterdam, one of the leading chamber choirs in the Dutch scene. Balancing that role with the Stockholm appointment will make her one of the most prominent choral conductors of her generation working across Northern Europe.

The move also continues a pattern of cross-Baltic appointments at the top of Scandinavian musical institutions, in which conductors trained in the Baltic states take up leadership roles in the better-resourced ensembles of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

For the Swedish Radio Choir, the century-old ensemble founded with the radio in 1925, the appointment marks the next chapter after the Ericson era (1952–82) established its global standing. The question facing Audere will be how the choir's famed precision and tonal clarity evolve under a chief conductor who has built her career largely outside Sweden.

Her first season in Stockholm will be watched closely by the European choral community, as listeners gauge what the pairing of one of the continent's top choirs with a Latvian chief currently based in the Netherlands produces on the concert platform.