On music - the subject I in fact work with!!

Think if I should write a little about music!!?? The subject I am actually working with! Sat now on the balcony and skimmed the magazine “Opus”.

Want to tip about the Swedish percussion ensemble Kroumata. Whose last recording was with Håkan Hagegård and Ziya Aytekin (which I though don’t know what he/she plays? Or if it is a singer!? And I guess it is a singer and a "she"? No, it was a he!! From Turkey, now living in Sweden! So, yes, this sounds as an interesting combination! Seen to what instruments he played: Turkish of different kinds, wind-instruments?:-)).

They also had a concert with the Swedish singer Erika Sunnegårdh, 41, in February this year in a newly written piece "The world as I see it", inspired by Einstein, by the Swedish composer Carl Unander Scharin.

She is going to sing at the Metropolitan again (in Turandot?). She sang recently in Beethoven's "Fidelio".

Both her parents were sing-pedagogues, her father (which I imagine was a bit older when she got born) died when she was only six years and the mother Margaretha is still living and I think she comes from US! She has an older half-brother Thomas Sunnegårdh which is also singer and his wife (?) is the singer Katarina Dalayman, all great singers I think. Erika was supposed to sing in a Mozart opera at Metropolitan but the director thought she had a too big voice for this!!

Tips to new singers from Erika: look so you have a team of supporters, supporting you as a whole being, whether you are singing or not. Work on yourself as a human being – singer you are only for a short time/a few years. Dare to be an individual who are singing and has something to say through your music and in life. Noone want to see a stage full of copies!

From her parents she has got as she says a self-critical inheritance.

She talks about a joy to sing and work in her studio!! In just singing. The love to music and lust to analyze she has got from her parents too. Erika’s dad had students like Birgit Nilsson and Kerstin Meyer.

Now Erika has taken lessons for the singer Catherine Malfitano on the Met, and thinks she has found new values in her voice. After two weeks of daily lessons Malfitano said to Erika: “Is there anyone who knows you can sing this beautiful?” Erika thinks Malfitano has helped her to find the sensualism in her voice.

In fact Erika also took ballet lessons at the Ballet Academy in Stockholm and was fairly clever on this too, musical, but tall... Too tall here in Sweden... So she had to skip such a carreer.

It also stood that there will come a portrait of Håkan Hagegård in the next magazine!! He has worked for 40 years now!?? See his creation HageGården on this site. In fact the young girl singing on the DVD we recorded is daughter to a cousin to Håkan and Erland Hagegård!!! But she has not been taking singing-lessons more than now two years… So she is singing with a fairly small voice!

Also see the site "Tonsatt - the Nightingale", where three Swedish composers, Sven-David Sandström, Reine Jönsson and Catharina Palmér, teach/help people to compose!!! In English too!! They also have a blog!!!

All this from the magazine "Opus"!!!

And as it is our national day today I just have to have a flag in this blog-post!??
Got it from my studierektor ("director of studies"), Per-Erik, in an email from him to us all! :-)