Albert Jan Vollbehr, (17.3.1957), was born in the northern Dutch town of Groningen. Later on he spent several years of his youth in the central Dutch city of Utrecht. As a small child he escaped death twice very narrowly. At the age of two he fell out of a window of a flat. Unexpectedly he recovered completely from a serious fracture of the base of the skull. At the age of five he was run over by a car and was again seriously injured. Perhaps partly because of these events, he continually ponders the reason of existence and the meaning of his life.

Music has always been a basic ingredient of his life. Since early childhood he has been acquainted with church music. He also remembers many times falling asleep while his older brother was practicing the organ preludes and fugues of Bach on the piano. From the age of seven he attended regular piano lessons. As a young teenager he experienced intensively the time often referred to as "the golden age of rock music", but at the age of 16 he discovered the music of Beethoven and Chopin and he became an ardent admirer of classical music. Before long he got to know the music of other great composers, especially Debussy, Ravel, Mahler and Shostakovich.

After one year of studying Greek and Latin, his inner restlessness brought him to England, where he studied linguistics at the Wycliffe Bible Translators Centre. There he met his future Finnish wife. Together with his wife he studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree in theology in London. Later on he also graduated as a teacher of English in Holland, but since 1978 he has not lived in his native country anymore. From the age of 24 he has lived in Finland, which after a long period of struggle and adaptation to the different language, culture and harsh climate became his second fatherland. At first he worked in a factory producing fashionable fur coats. As a result of his life's many contradictions he engaged again in music, this time also as a composer. He continued his studies of music first on his own and later in various Finnish schools of music and conservatoires. He finally graduated from the conservatoire of Kuopio.
Albert Vollbehr, born and raised in the big vibrant cities of western Europe, settled down as a teacher of music in the remote and desolate area of northern Savo, mid-eastern Finland. In the tiny isolated community of Rautavaara, where snow covers the earth seven months a year and where the density of population is less than 3 persons per square kilometer, he lived for ten years and composed most of his music. The enormous development of synthesizer technique and the computer in the second half of the eighties enabled him to create his own orchestral style. He functions as a composer, a performer, technician and producer of his own music.

Since 1996 Albert Vollbehr lives in the archipelago of Turku.

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