Time

How we interact with the inevitable cornerstone of our universe that we call Time , has always fascinated me. (And it has been a long time since I posted in this blog, partly because the last few months have been a very busy time!) Time ticks along at the same rate everywhere on this planet, at least with the exception of the dilations caused by relative velocity or gravitation, neither of which create a meaningful difference to us treading the Earth's surface. And yet our perception of time is highly individual: time seems to be able to shift gears and take us by surprise at any moment!

Time is of course a cornerstone not only of our universe, but crucially in music and many other art forms. I have often thought when observing a great musician that out of all the subtle means we have at our disposal as artists, timing is probably the most subtle and powerful of them all. Not timing completely on its own perhaps, but timing combined with other creative tools. Timing in music is often misunderstood as meaning regularity, but in fact regularity is rather boring and that is exactly where timing comes into the equation; the slight prolongation of a beat to suggest hesitation or delaying a note by a small amount in order to create rhythmic accent. If in doubt, listen to a really great organist or harpsichordist (and there are not that many!) and observe them making an inherently inexpressive instrument sing and communicate - that's timing!

The various speeds of time are present in other ways in the life of a musician. We use vast quantities of time in practising our instruments, preparing repertoire and rehearsing. Sometimes we underestimate how long time we will need to properly digest and internalize a piece of music, and we often get carried away and lose track of time... time flies when you have fun. We certainly experience the opposite too - the grueling couple of hours before a concert locked away in a depressing concert hall dressing room (pictured below) when time appears to refuse to move at all! And finally perhaps the greatest paradox of all, the perception of time when on stage; when our senses need to be ultra alert time seems to move fast and slow all at once! Like watching a slow motion film at high speed - I still find it quite bewildering.

On a more general level, managing time in our lives seems to be quite an issue for many people, and perhaps the challenges involved are greater in our modern world than ever before. Arguably a lot of it boils down to having a choice of how to spend our time; until about a hundred years ago the majority of people would have had little choice of how to spend their time if they were keen to stay alive - work as hard as possible to grow food so as not to starve, sleep for the remainder of the time available.

Paradoxically, in my own life, I often find that I manage to get a lot more done during the periods in life when I find myself thinking "oh, if I could only find more time for all the things I would like to do" than the times when I don't have a lot of planned activities. Suffice to say, now is one of those latter periods...

There is clearly a lot to say on the subject of time, but this blog post has to end here so that I can go and finish dinner... on time!

Marathon

As I write this, I am on my way to hear the final concert of the inaugural Stockholm Piano Festival in the Stockholm Concert Hall. Thanks to the great initiative and hard work by my colleagues Ivetta Irkha, Roland Pöntinen and Love Derwinger we have had a monumental celebration of all things piano for the last few days, involving some 40 pianists from the age of 6 to 77. Last night I had the pleasure of taking part in the Marathon Concert - 19 pianists playing 20 minute recitals back to back - in the gorgeous Grünewald Recital Hall in the Stockholm Concert Hall to an audience of more than 1300 people during the course of 10 hours. The picture below shows my colleague Henrik Måwe on stage, to give you an idea of the wonderful atmosphere in the hall.

I find It is always astonishing in these situations, almost unbelievable even, how the same piano can sound so dramatically different in the hands of different pianists, one after another! And this certainly was the case last night; an almost endless variety of sounds and resonances were drawn from the Steinway which had been beautifully prepared by resident piano technician Tore Persson. Altogether an extraordinary celebration of our wonderful instrument and repertoire!

I had the great honour of giving the world première performance of the Anders Nilsson Chaconne, that I have been writing about in a previous post. A great addition to the treasure that is the piano repertoire, which was very warmly received by the audience last night, including many of my colleagues who were there. After me came one of my old teachers from my student days, legendary Swedish pianist Staffan Scheja, seen playing Brahms' op.10 ballades here through the stage door.

Remains to keep fingers crossed the Stockholm Piano Festival becomes a regular occurrence. And tonight we have a party to look forward to...!

Chaconne

The life of the concert pianist is rarely as busy as when the concert diary looks empty; those weeks are spent locked up in our practise studios learning new repertoire or polishing up old pieces. This is where I find myself right now. As usual I have a wide range of music to work on - from standard works to more obscure music well outside the "canon" of international standard repertoire. In my first concert of the new season, on 5th of September, I have the tremendous pleasure and honour to give the world premiere performance of a brand new piece of Swedish piano music during the Stockholm Piano Festival in the Stockholm Concert Hall. The complete antithesis to playing a Beethoven sonata or a Chopin ballade - simply something nobody has ever heard before!

The piece in question is called Chaconne and was commissioned by me from Swedish composer Anders Nilsson. Anders has written two works for solo piano before, and me and my colleagues widely recognize those as some of the best music written for piano in Sweden in the last few decades. Those works were both composed more than 20 years ago, and despite their success we have had to wait a long time for another piano work from Anders' pen... until NOW! Personally I can hardly wait to present this new piece to the public, and I have just come far enough in the learning process to finally hear it properly myself, and just as I suspected we are faced with some powerful and beautiful music. So, be there on the 5th September!

Working on music by a living composer is something to get excited by in its own right, at least for someone like me who spend a lot of my time playing music by people who have been dead for hundreds of years. The interaction with the composer definitely adds another dimension to the creative process, and then there is the rather more mundane fact that if something is unclear in the score you can simply send a text message to the composer asking "should I be repeating the e-flat on the third beat of bar 104?" or "do you really mean f-natrual in the left hand in bar 146?". Would that we could send a text message to Beethoven now and again...!

When I start working on a certain piece of music my brain often make more or less random connexions between that and other works that I have previously played. And this time it occurred to me what extraordinary music has been created within the chaconne genre (and the related passacaglia). Here are some of my personal favourites, please feel free to add yours in the comments!

Händel (with or without Halvorsen) - Passacaglia
Bach (with or without the help of Busoni) - Chaconne from 2nd violin Partita
Beethoven - 32 variations
Franck - Chorale no.2
Brahms - 4th Symphony, 4th movement
Liszt - Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen
Shostakovich - Passacaglia from 1st violin Concerto
de Frumerie - Chaconne for piano

and as of recently...
Anders Nilsson - Chaconne!

Pianos and fine wine

We are coming to the end of yet another week of intense pianistic activity at Music at Ambialet, the piano summer school run by my dear friend and former teacher Paul Roberts. I have had the pleasure of being part of this operation for many years now, and I have always felt honoured to be invited to teach alongside Paul in this lovely inspiring atmosphere that he manages to create. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of summer courses for young pianists all over the world, but almost all of them are exclusively for young pianists at conservatoire level or similar. Music at Ambialet offers something different in that we have an advanced class of mainly young music students alongside an intermediate class of people all ages from all over the world. This eclectic mix clearly creates a really different and most stimulating environment and many participants keep coming back year after year. In my case I have been coming here for so long - first as a participant in the late 90s, then as a helper (I used to run the bar!) and finally invited as Paul's co-teacher - that it has started to feel like family and almost a home away from home.

The main difference for me this year is that I have my car here (and as of a couple of nights ago Karna has joined us too) and so I thought that as I am in the south of France with a car it would be a shame to miss the opportunity to buy some nice wine. The summer course has changed venues a few times over the years and as of last year it takes place on a small farm in a very remote corner of the Tarn region. The place is owned by Michel Berger, a French wine merchant who lives in Belgium during the year. Good news for me in my search of some good wine, as Michel was able to point me in the direction of a very interesting winemaker. So yesterday I punched an address into my GPS and drove off past the striking medieval town of Albi and another half-an-hour into the countryside beyond, and eventually ended up at a small vineyard called Domaines Plageoles. The surrounding area is littered with vineyards with small shops for dégustation et vente and the hills are covered with wine as far as the eye can see.

Domaines Plageoles turned out to be a very exciting winemaker indeed, with a special focus on old grapes of the Gaillac region with exotic names such as Ondenc and Prunelard. I spent 25 minutes tasting some absolutely wonderful wine and came out of there with a dozen of bottles as well as feeling immensely proud of having dealt with it all in French!

Road trip

As I write this I find myself in the South of France, in a tiny place called Albignac deep down in a beautiful lush green valley, where I am teaching and playing at the piano summer school that my old friend and once-upon-a-time teacher Paul Roberts runs here. A bunch of pianists - half of them young conservatoire students, half of them amateurs all ages - have come from all over the world to play to Paul and myself and when we don't play pianos we get waited upon and served lovely French food prepared from local produce by Paul's family and friends, who have come to be dear friends of mine over the more than ten years that I have been coming here. Hardly surprising then that I have come to count this as one of the highlights of my year!

In previous years I have always travelled here by plane, but this year I decided it would be fun to drive, so that's what I spent the last three days doing. I left home in the drizzling rain on Thursday morning and drove southwards, stopping in Malmö to pick up my friend Henrik who lives in Hamburg. Together we carried on through Denmark and waited for a slightly undesirable hour and a half for the ferry at Rødby, followed by a horrendously rough 45 crossing accompanied by horrendous fast-food on the boat. In the end we came to Hamburg where I stayed over night. 

I left on Friday morning on an investigation of the Autobahn system that was to take me to Luxembourg. On my way I fitted in a short stop in Cologne complete with a bratwurst and a visit to the magnificent cathedral. Aided by my trusted friend, the iPhone GPS who bravely struggled with the foreign street names (some entertainment value there, I can assure you!) I eventually arrived in the remarkable fairytale landscape of Berbourg in Luxembourg where I was served a lovely meal and stayed the night with old friend Anna Dannfelt. 

The final stage of my journey took me through France yesterday, and to the remarkably hilly and stunningly beautiful regions of Aveyron and Tarn, down some of the bendiest roads our trusted Peugeot has ever had to negotiate and come six o'clock last night, I had arrived. Slightly knackered I was too, but after a some cassoulet a drop of wine and a good night's sleep I was ready for some piano action!

Here is the view I woke up to...

Musical activities

So after four weeks of holiday the time has come to resume musical activity. I have always found it fascinating how refreshing a break from playing can be. Suddenly you seem to hear things with new ears, as it were, and once you start practising again so many ideas seem to spring up. And I seem to be lucky enough not to experience any tangible difficulty in getting those fingers back on form when I resume playing...

My first concert of the new season will be playing Schumann's Kreisleriana in France next week, but I shall come back to that in a later post. Before resuming pianistic activity proper I allowed myself a soft start involving the other two instruments which I occasionally pick up: the organ and the bass guitar!

The remarkable mess of pipes, windchests, action parts, bellows and electronics that makes up the organ, has a very special place in my heart. In fact it used to be my main instrument from the age of ten until just before I moved from home at about eighteen. The main reason I worked hard on my piano playing in those years was that my organ teachers made it clear to me that the piano was crucial to developing a good technique on the organ. When it was time to apply for music college I went for piano for this very reason and the idea was that I was going to go back to study the organ after a year. Well, that never happened, and I suspect that deep inside I already knew that I was going to become a pianist, although I had been advised against it given the difficulty of making a living in the profession. Either way, the organ remains a source of endless fascination to me and I really enjoy coming back to it now and then.

The organ console (organ speak for cockpit) pictured above is that of the organ in the village church in Sköldinge, 5 kilometers from where I grew up, and only a few kilometers from where I now live. This is where I had my first organ lessons and where I spent countless hours practising about 25 years ago. My poor dad had to drive me there and then sit and read a book for a few hours while I played my scales and stuff. The instrument has 25 stops and is unusually ambitious for a countryside church, and it was a fine tool indeed to have at your disposal when learning to play. The other day I played a couple of small pieces by Bach (on the anniversary of his death, as it happens) there in a little lunchtime recital. Very nostalgic of course.

I never listened to anything other than classical music as a child, and as a matter of fact in early interviews I maintained that I considered pop and rock music "naught but noise"! The truth is I realise now that I had no idea about any other style of music, so could not have known what I thought of it. Luckily that changed and rather suddenly too. When I was about thirteen years old I was introduced (by a viola player!) to the music of English rock band Queen. As so often in my case, this launched an obsessive fascination with their music, which has not entirely passed to this day. I found (and find) Queen's music a remarkable concoction of instinctive musicality, clever ideas, wit, sentimentality, and raw energy, and I quickly developed a great respect for the four musicians that make (or made) up the band. At about the same time as I discovered Queen, my music teacher in school, Bosse Sundahl, stuck a bass guitar in my hands. Over the next few years I taught myself to play bass pretty decently, if I may say so, largely by emulating Queen's bass player John Deacon.

This leads me to my other, slightly more light-hearted, musical activity of the last few days; for the last two summers my father-in-law has organized a barn dance in his barn, and for this occasion I have joined my various in-laws to provide some music for the dancing. This sounds nothing out of the ordinary perhaps, but in Sweden the particular kind of dance music that we play (dansbandsmusik) is highly stigmatized for being some of the blandest and most sentimental music known to man. We solve this by aiming for the blandest, most sentimental and most ridiculous songs in this repertoire, so as to really make a statement! And we call ourselves Svågerz Orkester - svåger is Swedish for brother-in-law - and we look thus:

Think you can tell a good time was had...!

Festival

If asked what they love playing the most, chances are that a significant proportion of classical musicians would answer: chamber music! I have always found chamber music a bit of a funny word - it somehow suggests a very small format and perhaps a slightly limited scale of expression which certainly isn't true at all - but I definitely count myself among those musicians who love and crave it.

What we tend to mean when we talk of chamber music is music written for a small number of players, let's say fewer than ten and typically three or four. This format has implications on how we work with this music, where it gets and can get performed; because of the small amount of musicians required to perform this music, the musical material is usually very equally distributed among the different parts, and in rehearsal everyone can have their say and influence the end result which we then present in a concert. This is an approach which would be completely impractical in an orchestra (which is one of the reasons you need a conductor) and in a solo work... well, there is not really anyone to discuss musical points with, is there? Also, because of the small number of players required, chamber music concerts can be done in smaller places and therefore nearer the audience.

As musicians we tend to love bouncing off our respective musical initiatives; you hear the person next to you play a phrase with a certain inflection and when you have it a few bars later you pick up that inflection, or you do something that is a complete contrast to name two out of a thousand options. In the best chamber music performances these things happen spontaneously, at the spur of the moment, and when it happens that way, trust me you are in heaven. And with an audience close up, you can sense that they like this a lot too. Add to this that most of the greatest composers have poured their soul out and composed some of their best works in the chamber music format. Am I getting my point across...?

As I write this I have just come home from the Saxå Chamber Music Festival in the west of Sweden, where I played my last three concerts for the 2014/2015 season. It has been an extremely rewarding year, where I have been lucky enough to play a large variety of music in some remarkable places around Europe and with some genuinely remarkable colleagues! Four weeks of much needed (and dare I say, well deserved) holiday lies ahead. If I love chamber music, I would say I love chamber music festivals even more, and Saxå certainly was no exception - it was a riot! Set in the spectacular setting of Saxå manor, where most concerts are held and where all musicians stay during the week, this festival has an additional attraction for me: there is a link with gastronomy grâce à the legendary Carl Jan Granqvist, who hosts the entire festival. Below is a picture of me together with Johannes Rostamo and Joakim Svenheden, gagging to go on stage and play Mendelssohn's D minor Trio in the final concert of the festival, which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. Hooray!

London & Daydreaming

I never felt the urge to express myself by through a blog - until last week! I was quite surprised by this sudden urge, but having spent a few days thinking it through, I decided to give blogging a try, and here we are. So, what has brought on this sudden urge then? 

I arrived in London, the city that used to be my home for nearly 10 years, last Wednesday. This time my reason for visiting was for a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 27 in the Thaxted Festival. As I stepped off the plane at Heathrow - I had started the day by giving breakfast to the pigs and chickens back home - the feeling came to me, like it has often done before, that I live in two parallel worlds. Parallel lives, almost. And I feel tremendously privileged that things have worked out that way for me. Now, I have often regretted not keeping a personal diary, and I know I don't stand the slightest chance to remember half of the wonderful things that I've been lucky enough to experience in my life so far. It then occurred to me a blog could act as a kind of diary, and that maybe someone out there might find it interesting to catch the occasional glimpse of the mad profession of a freelance musician - one of my lives. And maybe someone will find it entertaining, or informative, or amusing to read about the activities in my other life - that which takes place in my spare time back at the farm, feeding animals, gardening, building things, driving farm machinery...

I will be writing about music and various aspects of my profession, of course. There will certainly be quite a lot of cooking, vegetable gardening, building projects, pigs and chickens and the like. I probably won't be able to resist getting political at times. Throw in a bit of popular science, travel observations and a maximum of, say, one cat picture a month for good measure. If this sounds enticing then, well, watch this space!

As I post this, my very first blog post, I am back where the inspiration to write a blog initially came to me - Heathrow Airport in London (admittedly quite an unlikely place, not usually associated with inspiration!). My Mozart performance was last Friday, and the remainder of my stay in London has been spent largely wandering aimlessly around town, daydreaming, and meeting some dear friends for the odd drink and a bite to eat. I shall be returning to the concept of daydreaming in the future, as I find its restorative effect on the brain fascinating. In these last few days my brain has really needed a recharge; this spring has largely been a mad scramble of learning and performing large quantities of repertoire with a liberal sprinkling of extremely physical gardening work on top of that. I now have a few more concerts to look forward to in the coming week, and then I look forward to some four weeks off playing (but certainly not off gardening!). 

Time to board a plane, then!