Swedish tenor Olof Lilja grew up in Stockholm where he studied at the Royal College of Music and the State College of Opera. He made his operatic début in 1992 as Basilio/Don Curzio in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. Since then he has appeared in buffo and lyric parts at among others the Royal Swedish Opera, the Drottningholm Palace Theatre, the Malmö Opera and the Värmland Opera. Roles worth mentioning are Der Student in Reimann’s Gespenstersonate (Royal Swedish Opera 2000), Vecchia/Gelosia in Rossi’s L’Orfeo (Boston Early Music Festival 1997) and both Belmonte and Pedrillo in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Malmö Opera 1996 and Folkoperan/Riksteatern 2003).

Olof Lilja is also very much in demand as a concert singer, especially as Evangelist in Bach's great oratorios. His repertoire also includes Bach’s H-mollmesse and Magnificat, Handel’s Messiah and Brockes-Passion, Mozart’s Requiem and C-mollmesse, Haydn’s Schöpfung and Jahreszeiten and Monteverdi’s Vespro della beata vergine. He has appeared at the festivals in Utrecht, Dresden, Bremen, Wroclaw and Boston, as well as on recordings and in television and radio, both in Sweden and abroad. For many years, Olof Lilja was a member of the Royal Swedish Opera Choir.