“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 influential figures in Finland’s performing arts scene, Erik was born into a well-known Swedish-speaking artistic family. His father, Ulf Söderblom, served for 30 years as Chief Conductor of the Finnish National Opera and and was one of the founders of the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Erik began playing piano and cello in childhood and has been immersed in the arts ever since.
He studied philosophy and arts at the University of Helsinki, continued with theatre studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, and then pursued opera directing at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich in the class of the legendary August Everding, supported by a special talent scholarship from the Henrik Steffens Foundation. Erik later returned to Finland to attend the directors' class at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki, where he earned a Master of Arts degree.. During those early years (1982–1985), Erik also conducted the Chamber Strings of Helsinki. With this ensemble, he launched his very first festival — a week of concerts marking the 300th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s birth — laying the foundation for what would become Finland’s highly regarded baroque music tradition.
From 1988 to 1990, Erik worked as Director of the Turku City Theatre. In 1990, he co-founded Q-teatteri Helsinki with a group of young and talented artists — actors, directors, writers, and set designers of his generation — developing it into a bearer of the progressive and radical impulse into a hub for progressive and radical theatre. At Q-teatteri, he directed an acclaimed series of productions that included new Finnish works as well as classics like Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Many of these productions toured festivals in Finland and abroad. Today, Q-teatteri is regarded as one of Finland’s leading theatre companies. Erik served as Chairman of the Board and Artistic Director from 1996 to 2002. On Erik’s initiative, Q-teatteri founded Baltic Circle, a network for independent theatre groups around the Baltic Sea. In 2000, he established this as the Baltic Circle Theatre Festival, serving as its first Artistic Director and setting the vision for its future. Today, the festival is an internationally recognized platform for contemporary theatre and performance..
In 2009, Erik was appointed Artistic Director and CEO of the Helsinki Festival — Finland’s largest arts festival, running since 1968 under the Helsinki Events Foundation. The festival’s programming spans classical and world music, theatre, dance, circus, visual arts, and large-scale city events. Under his leadership, which concluded in October 2015, the Helsinki Festival grew into one of Europe’s most prominent multi-disciplinary arts events and the largest of its kind in the Nordic countries, increasing its annual audience by 25% to over 300,000 and expanding its budget by 20%.
Erik left a strong mark on the Helsinki Festival’s evolution. He significantly expanded its scope by introducing city-wide happenings with tens of thousands of participants and secured funding to bring top international orchestras to Helsinki each year. For his final edition in 2015, he curated a special country focus, Focus China — the most comprehensive presentation of Chinese art and culture ever seen in the Nordic countries. Supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, the programme showcased over 500 Chinese artists through drama, dance, music, film, photography, installations, and new media. Since 2015, the Helsinki Festival has been awarded the EFFE Label recognizing its artistic quality and international impact.
In 2015, Erik became the in-house artistic partner at MiklagardArts, an independent, self-funded creative platform addressing the significant demographic shifts in Finnish and Nordic societies through artistic interventions, while championing diversity, equity, inclusion, and the internationalization of the arts ecosystem.
In 2016, he was invited to join the Artistic Committee of the Tampere Theatre Festival, Finland’s most prominent international performing arts festival, as a curating member.
Between 2017 and 2024, Erik served as the Artistic Director and CEO of Espoo City Theatre. During his tenure, he transformed the theatre from a traditional city institution into a responsive and relevant performing arts house, establishing it as a trendsetter in the Finnish performing arts scene. This rebranding and contextual repositioning included the much-debated—and at times scandalous—name change of the theatre to “& – Espoo Theatre”. The theatre, located in the capital region of Finland, produces its own performances and annually hosts 15–20 guest performances from around the world, becoming increasingly relevant and accessible to an audience with a growing diversity of cultural backgrounds. In 2024, impressed by the theatre’s success, the Espoo City Council made the long-awaited decision to build a new venue. The new theatre, designed by leading Finnish architects, is set to open in 2028. Erik, together with the Cultural Department of the City of Espoo, developed the strategy for this new building.. He actively fostered co-creation with different organisations, including the Aalto University and EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern , emphasizing anti-disciplinary artistic expressions and methods, as well as the intersection of the arts with artificial intelligence and extended reality. Thanks to Söderblom’s visionary leadership, & – Espoo Theatre achieved national acclaim and was honored as Theatre of the Year in 2025..
With over 60 premiered drama productions and 40 opera productions to his name, Erik is recognized not only as a leading theatre director but also as one of his country’s most accomplished opera directors. His work includes award-winning productions of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (Entführung aus dem Serail) and The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro) at Pori Opera, Don Giovanni for the Helsinki Festival, and a massive outdoor staging of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Holländer) in Turku, featuring top-ranked singers like Juha Uusitalo, Matti Salminen, Päivi Nisula, and Jorma Silvasti. Among his standout projects are a staging of J.S. Bach’s St John Passion with the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra, and a semi-concertante performance of Shostakovich’s long-forgotten opera parody Orango for the Helsinki Festival, performed with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen. He presented his artistic farewell as Artistic Director of the Helsinki Festival with a widely acclaimed semi-staged production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, featuring Florian Boesch and Karita Mattila in the lead roles. Worth mentioning is also his much spoken-of reinterpretetion of Mozart´s Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in 2023.
As a trained musician, Erik brings a unique ability to interpret even the most intricate contemporary music scores. He has directed the world premieres of several Finnish operas, including 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—as well as Veli-Matti Puumala’s Anna Liisa for the Helsinki Festival. In 2019, Erik brought to life FLASH FLASH – The Two Deaths of Andy Warhol, a bold and unconventional work by Juhani Nuorvala and Juha Siltanen, which has since been hailed as one of the most striking pieces of contemporary Finnish music theatre in recent decades.
Beyond his artistic work, Erik has made a strong impact as a theatre educator. In 1998, he founded the legendary music theatre class at Turku Polytechnic, and in 2000, became Professor of Acting at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. From 2005 to 2009, while continuing as professor, he also served as Vice-Rector of the university, contributing to the strategic merger of Finland’s major arts institutions — the Theatre Academy, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Sibelius Academy — into what is now the University of the Arts Helsinki.
His deep interest in history led him to write the script for the four-part television series The Activists, produced by Finland’s national broadcaster YLE in 2019..
Mentorship is another important part of Erik’s work. He has supported a number of young artists, directors, and festival professionals in Finland and abroad. As part of this role, he collaborated with the European Festivals’ Association for the Festival Readings in Sochi in 2016.
Erik has served on various committees for the appointment of professors and lecturers at Nordic theatre academies, is an expert consultant for the Stina Krook Foundation and as a member of the Delegation for the Swedish Cultural Foundation.
Since 2016, he has also been a member of the European House for Culture.
In 2018, Erik was honored by the French government as a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters).
Erik speaks Swedish (his mother tongue) and Finnish, and is professionally fluent in English and German. He also has basic working knowledge of Norwegian, Danish, French, Italian, Estonian, and Turkish.
Currently Erik lives in Lund, Sweden, working in theatres such as Malmö Opera, Uppsala City Theatre and others..