She was brought up in a musical family in which her father player the trumpet and her maternal grandmother was a pianist.
Both employed the Suzuki method where the pupils learn to play short tunes by ear.
[1] Thanks to her good progress, when she was 13 she was able to enter the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus where she was one of the youngest students ever.
[1][3] On her return to Denmark in 1990, she accepted an offer from the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra to step in as the soloist for the Danish premiere of the violin concerto Offertorium by the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina.
Åstrand's recordings also include works by Niels Gade, Claude Debussy and Fini Henriques.