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!

Dillkött

In my professional life I spend quite a bit of time trying to get people outside Sweden (and within!) to discover Swedish music, old and new. I don't know quite how we have managed to get ourselves in the situation that we are in in relation to our own art music in Sweden, but generally speaking it has such a low profile that most people, including a lot of musicians seem to be almost unaware of its existence! Hopefully this can be rectified relatively easily - by performing the best works more often and to do it extremely well. And if we start playing it at home, chances are that more people will get curious of it abroad too. At least this is how I see it, slightly simplified perhaps, but then I am on holiday at the moment. Which brings me to... Swedish food!

I don't think you could say that Swedish cuisine is keeping a particularly low profile these days; Swedish chefs seem to do extremely well all over the world, both in prestigious cooking contests and as award winning restaurateurs, and the romantic notion that we all go into the woods to pick mushrooms  berries and to shoot birds and beasts certainly seem to strike a chord internationally. But not all Swedish food is about things gathered in the wild, and in fact most traditional dishes rely mainly on farm produce as it would have been far to time and energy consuming to go foraging in the old days. 

Today I passed through Katrineholm where my friend Peter runs a great butcher shop called Landet i Centrum, and I bought some really lovely local neck of lamb, which I turned into dillkött (literally meat with dill) for our supper. Dillkött is one of those hearty, yet summery dishes that Swedes remember being served by their grandmothers. It contains a few of the trademarks of traditional Swedish cuisine: the fondness for exotic spices and the combination of sweet and sour tastes, and of course it is served with potatoes. (Food in Sweden used to translate almost exclusively into meat or fish and potatoes as recently as 25 years ago!)

Here is how I make it: 

500g neck of boneless lamb (or veal) + bones (optional)

1 medium onion, quartered

2-3 carrots, cut into chunks

the white part of one leek

5 white peppercorns 

5 pieces of allspice

2 cloves

2 bay leaves

1 sprig of thyme

salt

single cream

butter

flour

copious amounts of dill

75ml caster sugar

75ml water

2 tsp spirit vinegar 

Cut the meat into 2 cm dice and put in a pan (along with the bones if you have them) covered by cold water. Bring to the boil and let simmer for a few seconds. Drain off the water using a colander and rinse the meat under cold running water. Clean the pan and put the meat (and bones) back in along with the onion, carrots, leek, peppercorns, allspice, cloves and bay leaves. Cover with water and put in 1 tsp salt for each liter of water. Bring to the boil once more, skim off any foam that rises to the surface and then let simmer in a covered pan for about an hour or until the meat is tender. In the meantime combine the sugar, water and vinegar with the stalks from the dill in a separate pan and bring to the boil. Check the balance between sweet and sour in this liquid - it should be the same as in a good Chinese sweet and sour sauce. Set aside. 

In a new pan, melt a good dollop of butter and whisk in a tablespoon or two of flour. Let the roux sizzle for a little while without getting browned. Ladle in some of the cooking liquid from the meat and whisk vigorously until you have a smooth and quite thick velouté. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the meat and carrots into the velouté and add some cream. Season with salt and by adding a few spoonfuls of the sweet and sour vinegar and sugar solution. Add more cooking liquid if needed. Chop the dill finely and add it to the finished dish just before serving to ensure maximum dill flavour and to prevent the dill from turning grey in the sauce. Serve with new potatoes.

New Growth

To come home after traveling can sometimes feel a bit frustrating; the chores of daily life - washing up, paying bills, not to mention the not always so glamorous piano practise - stand out in stark contrast to the carefree life "on the road". I am extremely lucky in that coming home means returning to such a beautiful and exciting place however, which only very rarely causes me this kind of frustration, and never is this more true than during spring and early summer, when everything in nature grows at such an astonishing rate that you hardly recognize the place after a few days absence.

In the days immediately prior to my leaving for London last week, I planted a lot of seeds in our brand new raised bed garden. (Most of the seeds went in much later than what is normal, but the whole raised bed arrangement simply wasn't ready before!) Most of these seeds had not even started to sprout when I left, and even those which had sprouted where no more than a centimeter or two above the ground, as in the case of the broad beans in the pictured above. Now, if I had stayed at home I would have been out there checking the progress of all this at least three times a day, which means I would hardly have noticed any change every time I checked, whereas now that I had been away for six days the rate of growth seemed simply alarming! 

The same astonishing rate of growth applies to the five little piglets that our sow Bonnie gave birth to just over three weeks ago. Here they are as I came out to feed their mother this morning. I think they thought 6.30 was a little early for breakfast as they decided to stay in their cozy straw bed, yawning and snoozing as I was taking their picture.

Finally, on the subject of things home-grown, something of a different nature which appeared (hot off the press!) in the mail yesterday:

This brand new anthology of Swedish piano music, from the 18th century up to the present day, was compiled by my esteemed colleague Hans Pålsson. Hans has done a great job in selecting a large variety of shorter piano pieces ranging from the most familiar works by Sjögren, Peterson-Berger and Stenhammar to rare treats along with a generous portion of new music by both women and men. I feel proud to have played a small part in the production of this volume as a proof-reader, and obviously the divulgation of Swedish music is a pursuit which is close to my heart, which makes me doubly pleased to have been involved. Do I need to mention that I wholeheartedly recommend this new anthology?

Off to Stockholm now for some rehearsals for the concerts in Saxå later in the week.