We went into Gamla Stan on the last day in May to pay for our festival passes and had a great reunion with the organisers. It has become a habit to be the first customers through the door. Purely by chancw we' met a couple of friends we'd met on our Turkey trip. Sadly they were going on elsewhere and could not enjoy the festival. Further friends emerged for the first concert, much to our pleasure and we felt very much at home.
We went to twenty events,concerts and talks, whic would be tedious to read about in detail. Various themes ran through the series. One was female composers. Peter Pontvik, the artistic director has been consistent in recognising the influence of female composers, often supressed under the 'anonymous ' label by replacing the word with 'anonyma' and one of the concerts and a talkwas by a female group singing works by female composers. The music was good but the concert was marred by the ego ( another theme of the programme ) of the group leader who was clearly somewhat insecure and not singing very well. She would have been better restricting her role to conducting. as it was, her pushing other singers about and nearly hitting a neighbouring singer with her conducting was rather disturbing.
Ego alsoshowed up with the Swingle Singers, hired to provide a programme of early music, who insisted in showing off a lot of their modern repertoire. Their music was enjoyable but paled markedly in comparison with other and more period concerts. We did find the talk given by their leader on the technique used to produce instrumental accomplements very interesting, particularly in blending singers to produsce a continuous series of notes over several breaths. The counter example was a more exciting concert by "Trinfo di Piffari" a group of shawm, dulcian, sackbut, organ and percussion players who were loud, confident and possibley the best concert of the series. This concert happenned in the Knights church, a place without heating or any toilets, knights presumably men of steel, albeit with rusty armour. Another excellent concert in the same spot was "Gamba Forte" a duo of gamba and forte piano, the viol da gamba being several hundred years old and with a wonderful tone. The best piece was the first, JS Bach's Sonata in D major. There was though an example of virtuosity and ego getting in the way of music in a later piece. In a very fast section the viol player showed incredible virtuosity in the work of both hands but very little music actually emerged. The tune was carried by the piano. Yet another concert in the knights hall brought great delight; PterPonmtvik conducting, where necessary a choir in Sweden's oldest mass. The excellenet singing and unobtrusive conducting gave enormous pleasure.
The last concert was good in parts by a folk singer Lena Willemark, a little past her best and Ale Moller, a prolifice instrumentalist and singer. They played very old Swedish folk music and were great fun.
We said goodbye to our concert friends and went home, earlier than usual to bed in Badger feeing rather sad that the experience was finished for the year and hoping very much to be able to return in 2018.
The whole experience is very intense, leaving us with occasional periods with nothing to do when we try to find a quiet place in the sun to rest up and read from our Kindles. As a final comment I must note again the pleasure of going home to bed each evening, travelling by ferry across Stockholm harbour and looking at the yellowish green light of the Northern night sky. Perhaps that is the best bit of all.
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