Philip Pogson

NORDIC MOODS AND BAROQUE ECHOES: AN ARTIST’S JOURNEY

Founder and Artistic Director of The Marais Project Jennifer Eriksson gives readers insights into her journey as an artist and the need for an artist to continually challenge themselves.

It is my belief that artists need to constantly evolve, to be prepared to challenge ourselves and head in new directions. There is nothing more demotivating than getting stuck in an artistic rut. Our job is to be restless. Getting comfortable is the enemy.

Duo Langborn/Wendel from Sweden

Perhaps no artist exemplifies the life-long commitment to ‘moving on’, to pressing forward, like Pablo Picasso. In the summer of 2022 I got to visit the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and it was something of a revelation. Wandering through the art-filled rooms of this beautiful building I was confronted with the sheer breadth of the Picasso’s creativity. He was a freak – working in just about every medium from painting, etching, ceramics and drawing to sculpture. Whatever he was doing, the originality and vividness of his artistic vision shines through. Although as a human being he was far from perfect, Picasso the artist never stopped experimenting, and continued so throughout his long life.

Picasso’s restlessness provides inspiration for The Marais Project’s upcoming ‘Nordic Moods & Baroque Echoes’ collaboration with visiting Swedish musicians, ‘Duo Langborn/Wendel.’ Coming back from my mid 2022 holiday in Europe where I met Catalina Langborn from the Duo, and needing to reboot my post-Covid performance schedule, I felt this new project with new musicians and the potential for new music came just at the right time. More of this soon-to-happen baroque/folk/new music collaboration later, but first a little of my background.

Jenny Eriksson studying in Holland in the late 1980s

Moving on artistically is not new to me. My career to date has featured several major, even profound, shifts. The first of these was some decades ago when I gave up the modern cello and dedicated myself to mastering the then rare 7-string viola da gamba. This was the mid-1980s after I had completed 4 years as a cellist at the then NSW State Conservatorium of Music. This period was also the beginning years of the early music movement in Australia. Apart from the harpsichord and the recorder – and perhaps the organ – there was little or no tertiary tuition available in early performance styles. If anything, there was a resistance from some mainstream teachers to their students moonlighting on gut strings, wooden flutes, or trumpets without valves. The received wisdom was that using historically informed approaches to early music would ruin your hard-won, conservatorium-honed ‘technique’ – an argument that did not stop Picasso working in clay and metal as well as paint! Thankfully, views on this issue have matured over time. In the 2020s many musicians shift effortlessly between older and modern performance techniques and ancient and newer versions of their instruments. But given the then state of early music in this country, as with many of my generation, I moved to The Netherlands for several years to learn my craft as a viola da gambist and early musician specialist. For quite some time I almost exclusively performed music written before 1750.

The Marais Project’s Smorgasbord! album

However, when I started to make recordings 15 years or so ago, I realised that there was little call for an Australian version of what had already been done in Europe and elsewhere. I had to push beyond an ‘early music only’ mindset. I am not saying all early musicians need to do this, but I certainly felt it was the right course for me. One reason being that in the case of my instrument, amazing musicians like Jordi Savall – a Catalan like Picasso – and the Belgian virtuoso, Weiland Kuijken, had released many fine albums of the core viola da gamba repertoire. My challenge was to do something different, that complemented rather than imitated the generations before me. As I lived in Australia the choice seemed obvious: add newly composed, local music to the early music mix. My first CD – commercial streaming did not yet exist – included original Australian works I’d commissioned juxtaposed with traditional gamba repertoire. We have pursued this philosophy to this day. Our most recent release, ‘Australian Monody,’ includes six contemporary pieces alongside music by Marais, Purcell and Dowland and Australian Colonial composer, Isaac Nathan, all performed on period instruments. The mix and match approach to programming is now considered quite normal. For example, although playing a modern piano, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has revitalised the solo recital through intelligent curation. He carefully juxtaposes works from across hundreds of years of keyboard history in a way that challenges accepted norms. In doing so he also points to remarkable continuities between figures like Rameau and Debussy.

Swedish folk song suite performed by The Marais Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4v6ZEw6qus

Twilight in Sweden…

A few years after our initial CD releases, I embarked on another shift, this time towards folk music and Scandinavia. Appearing on stage regularly with Swedish-born lutenist and guitarist, Tommie Andersson, stimulated this next move. Working together got us thinking about how to best express our Swedish heritage in music. This led to what we titled our ‘Swedish Roots’ project exploring baroque, classical, jazz, and folk music from Sweden. It was a massive effort to identify and learn the repertoire, to find a singer (tenor Pascal Herrington) who was willing to learn Swedish, and to assemble this new repertoire for early instruments. Tommie even arranged the ABBA song ‘Waterloo’ for viola da gamba and theorbo (bass lute) in French baroque style! At that point in time, no Australian early music or chamber music ensemble was regularly programming Scandinavian music, let alone of such diversity. The resulting album, ‘Smörgåsbord!’ did well on the classical charts and regularly featured on Swedish radio.

Eriksson and Australia’s only electric viola da gamba

My next Picasso-like moment was purchasing an electric viola da gamba and collaborating with jazz musicians to form ‘Elysian Fields,’ this country’s first and only electric viola da gamba band. I have written about this ongoing project elsewhere, but its genesis was the same internal need I felt to challenge myself, this time with jazz and improvised repertoire. In one sense Elysian Fields has been my most technically difficult move as the electric viola da gamba is a completely different instrument to its acoustic cousin. I’ve had to learn to use an amplifier and effects pedals, play with drums and come to grips with an entirely new sound world, a genre distant even from my days as a modern cellist. This journey is ongoing – and I love it.

Singer/violinist Susie Bishop – who can speak Swedish

This leads back to ‘Nordic Moods and Baroque Echoes’, our 2023 partnership with Sweden’s ‘Duo Langborn/Wendel.’ Duo Langborn/Wendel consists of the unusual combination of baroque violin, played by Catalina Langborn, and percussionist Olof Wendel, who specialises in the rarely heard cimbalom. Catalina is one of Sweden’s most sought-after Baroque violinists and concertmasters. She is also an expert on, and composes, Swedish folk music – yes, composed folk music is a thing! Wendel, has a similarly distinguished career having worked with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony, and the Royal Opera. He also appears with a range of cutting-edge improvised music groups.

It is important to understand that in Scandinavia and across the Nordic world from Iceland to the Faroe Islands, there is a long history of blending folk music and folk lore into classical music – and vice versa. For many musicians from this region, the idea of firm classical/folk boundaries does not exist. Norway’s Edvard Greig and Finland’s Jean Sibelius are two well-known examples of a substantial folkloric movement. More recently, Iceland’s Bjork has spent her career defying musical categorisation. The back story to the Nordic’s worlds approach to music is explored in detail in Andrew Mellor’s remarkable book, ‘The Northern Silence: Journeys into Nordic Music & Culture.’ Australia has no equivalent of the folk music schools and folk high schools dotted across Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.

A Spotify playlist featuring some of the music featured on this tour https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0YIPKN5BK5zycJqD5x9oHq?si=23f6790c5f2c4c24

You can even study folk music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, one of Sweden’s most distinguished tertiary music education institutions. Collaborating with Duo Langborn/Wendel in Australia offers another opportunity for me and my ensemble, The Marais Project, to expand our focus beyond traditional early music. Early music, like rock and pop, started out as a radical movement, but in some ways has settled down into its own norms and accepted ways of doing things.

Leading violinist in both folk and baroque, Catalina Langborn

Catalina and I have only met once in Stockholm last July, but we immediately hit it off and knew that we could work together. The Marais Project’s Tommie Andersson and singer/violinist Susie Bishop have enthusiastically embraced working with Catalina and Olof. Susie already speaks and sings Swedish, her partner being from southern Sweden. The five of us have worked collaboratively on-line to create a set of distinctive and exciting music for our performances. At the beginning we agreed a frameup for our concerts that would feature and blend:

  1. Baroque music
  2. Swedish folk and traditional music
  3. Original works by group members

Thus the title: ‘Nordic Moods & Baroque Echoes.’

As the instrumentation of the combined ensembles is unique – particularly with the inclusion of the cimbalom – we have all been madly composing and arranging over the past weeks, sending new versions to each other overnight to be played through, corrected, and returned to sender in the time zone of origin.

We will meet face to face and start rehearsing in Sydney in early February 2023. It will be strange and wonderful to be in the same room and on the same continent together. We are grateful to Musica Viva Australia and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee for supporting our collaboration. We are also thankful to Australian Digital Concert Hall for broadcasting our final performance. It is gratifying that funders continue to recognise the need for musicians and artists to experiment, to challenge ourselves and to move forward artistically. None of us is Picasso, but his example inspires.

If all goes well, we will repeat our performances in Sweden in June and July, 2023.

Tour Dates (full details at www.maraisproject.com.au ) Presented in association with Musica Viva Australia  and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee

Swedish scene near Eriksson’s cousin’s home, summer 2022

Tour dates:

Featured image : Founder and Artistic Director of ‘The MaraisProject’ Jennifer Eriksson