We bought season tickets for another concert series of chamber music at Konserthuset. Best part: as repeat customers, we got the option to keep the same seats, which are excellent. Front row, just left of center, gives us the best view and best sound.

Last year’s series was very much a mixed bag. Some I found boring; some were delightful. Today’s piano trio by Elfrida Andrée and piano quartet by Gabriel Fauré were both in the “too many notes” category for my taste.

Vårsalongen, “The Spring Salon”, is an annual art event where anyone in Sweden can send in their works to be considered for inclusion. The result is always eclectic and varied. The works range from paintings, drawings and sculpture to video installations, and more. This year all the works can be seen online.

I was happy to see quite a few pieces of textile art, even though I didn’t particularly like any one of them. Another memorable works this year was Vintern 2021/22 by Mårten the dog, which consisted of all the gloves and mittens that the artist had carried home from his walks during one season.

Ingrid is a budding artist and it wasn’t hard to convince her to come with us, and Eric is always up for art exhibitions. Adrian was perhaps a bit less enthusiastic, but I was pretty sure even he would enjoy it. The exhibition is so democratic and relatable – there’s even a “Young Spring Salon” section for sixteen to eighteen-year-olds – that there’s always something for everyone.

Predictably, Adrian enjoyed the sculptures the most. When given a choice, he always prefers to work three-dimensionally, whether with paper or clay or Legos.

Liljevalchs was recently expanded and now has several new galleries which I hadn’t visited before. The upstairs ones had amazing ceilings.

Those galleries currently exhibited works by Jockum Nordström, whose graphical works I didn’t find particularly interesting. But his mobile sculptures were nice: agglomerations of objects and pieces of wood, with a weight attached to a rotating arm of metal wire, and something noise-making for that weight to hit on each pass around the circle: a zither, or a broken violin, or a bicycle bell.

Afterwards we had lunch at Liljevalchs’ new vegetarian restaurant. The food wasn’t bad but they were badly understaffed so we waited a long time for our food, only to find out that they had lost half of our order, so half of us had to re-order and wait again.

Ekman’s Cacti.

Intense, fun, captivating, irreverent. Made fun of itself, and of ballet critique, through a voice track that at times described what was going on and at times asked, in an anguished voice, “What does it mean?” Never a dull moment.

Memorable scene: a man, with his upper body bare, standing and posing in harsh side light. As the light switched from a source on the left to one on the right, everything changed, even though nothing did.

Hjálmarsdóttir’s Riptide.

Never really connected to this one. Already two weeks later I’ve mostly forgotten what it was like.

Naharin’s Minus 16. Same experience as last time: the initial Echad mi yodeah chair dance was powerful and unique (although a bit less so this time around because I knew what was happening) but the rest felt kind of pointless. Yes, the audience members they invited onto the scene had fun dancing, but it wasn’t interesting for me to watch other people dance with no particular choreography.

Ballet evening at the Royal Opera. The first of the three pieces was called Cacti and involved cacti. Which at first glance and at a distance looked like real things, but it didn’t take a long time of watching the dancers hold and swing them around in a rather cavalier manner to figure out that they can’t be. It would have been way cooler if they had danced with real cacti, but health and safety probably wouldn’t allow it. And the cacti might not survive it, either.

Another concert in the chamber music series. Today’s ensemble consisted of a flute, a violin and a viola.

Hopscotch for solo flute by Anna Clyne (modern) was technically impressive but emotionally not interesting.

Capricci for violin and viola by Bjarne Brustad (1930s) was too modern for me. Too jarring and not enough harmony and melody. Although the fragments where the violin took on a folk music tone were interesting.

Rumi Settings for violin and viola by Augusta Read Thomas (modern) was even more modern and didn’t sound at all like anything I would associate with Rumi, although it was described as being directly inspired by one of Rumi’s poems.

Serenade in D Major for flute, violin and viola by Ludwig van Beethoven was charming and more relaxed and approachable than most of Beethoven. Although I guess I’m more familiar with his symphonies than his chamber music. The booklet accompanying the concert explains that Beethoven’s chamber music was probably not written to be performed in a concert hall, but for private performances, either at musical salons or simply by amateur musicians. If I was filthy rich, I’d totally pay for people to play Beethoven’s chamber music for me in my living room.

Trio for flute, violin and viola by Endre Szervánsky (1950s) was likewise charming. Fluttery, light and airy, with the instruments’ melodies often very close to each other, almost melting into one voice. (Unlike string quartets.) The piece made me think of birds and fairies and flowering glades in dappled sunlight. Somehow it felt like film music, like something that could have been in an early Disney movie or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” or some other romantic, pastoral fantasy.

All the composers were presented with a picture in the booklet, except Beethoven, oddly enough.

The annual gingerbread house competition and exhibition at the Museum of Architecture and Design.

The competition, open to anyone, has a different theme every year. This year’s theme was “Around the corner”, and the contestants had interpreted it in every possible way: some very literal, some more figurative, and some had probably shoehorned whatever they had built into the theme after the fact. There were a lot of labyrinths (with lots of corners) and houses with round corners or no corners. For some reason there were several houses built around the four seasons (maybe because houses tend to have four corners?)

The competition is divided into three categories: experts (architects, designers and bakers); under 12; and everyone else. This year many of the most interesting and impressive contributions came from the “everyone else” group. The winner of the expert category was, in fact, strikingly bland and boring. (I didn’t even waste a photo on it.)


In recent years, I’ve noticed works on the theme of how we’re destroying nature, how we need to be kinder to the Earth, and how a more sustainable future is just around the corner. I wonder if the share of works on this topic is on an upward trend.

Stockholm Early Music Festival, Christmas Edition.

I’ve been on SEMF’s mailing list for years, but never actually made it to any of their concerts. The main festival is usually in the beginning of June and clashes with the end of the school year. And early December of course is always a busy time. This year, though, Eric and Adrian were away on a scout hike, so we couldn’t do anything family-Christmassy anyway, so I could take the whole afternoon and evening for concerts.

The German Church is a lovely concert venue with beautiful acoustics. Isn’t it wonderful that we humans have evolved the capability to appreciate music, and the capability to make music ourselves, and also to construct buildings to make the most of both?

The mini-festival consisted of three concerts (plus an optional extra late-night one which I skipped).

The first one, with Finnish Ensemble Gamut, I found incredibly boring. I’m glad I bought tickets for the whole afternoon because if I’d just heard this one I would have been utterly disappointed. It was just an endless drone with little variation. There were instruments, and there was singing, and it definitely had a melody – but apart from the songs with elements of Finnish runo songs, they all sounded so same. The only way I knew that one song ended and another started was because the ensemble all switched instruments. And the singer’s mannered way of singing really didn’t suit my taste. I was nearly falling asleep and had to take out my knitting to keep awake.

The second concert, with The Nordic Baroque Band, was much better. All instrumental music, with baroque versions of violin, viola, cello and flute. (Today I learned that the baroque violin is held differently from the modern one – not squeezed between chin and shoulder but just pressed against the shoulder. And the baroque cello is held between the legs, without an endpin.)

The third one (Nordic Voices), in contrast, was all-vocal, but equally good, if not better. Their repertoire ranged all the way back to medieval polyphonic liturgies (Olavsmusikken). Beautiful, enchanting, soaring, intimate.

Another concert in our series of chamber music at Konserthuset, with the Maier quartet.

Premiere of Stabilitas loci by Ylva Skog. The composer herself was present to introduce the piece. Written during the pandemic isolation – quiet and a bit melancholy. Raindrops against a window that turn into little streams. Lovely – definitely the nicest part of this evening. And there’s more of her on Spotify!

String Quartet Op. 9 by Bo Linde. The information leaflet says that he “was active at a time when Swedish music life was characterized by disagreement between modernists and traditionalists, and counted himself as one of the latter”. I really can’t understand how because this piece sounded almost aggressively modern to me. Long stretches of pizzicato; notes so high that the violin could barely produce them and most of the audience very definitely couldn’t hear (and I only heard because I was sitting two metres from the violinist and have quite young ears still). I mean, you can use the violin as a balalaika but maybe then just write music for a quartet of balalaikas instead?

String Quartet No 15 A-minor Op. 132 by Beethoven. Quite dramatic, kind of all over the place. A more trained ear could probably hear how the different parts make a whole, but for me it was a jumble of disconnected parts. The slow movement (“Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart”) felt like a constant slowing-down, like a Shepard tone but in speed and energy, not tone. I found it completely energy-sapping. Not my thing.

One thing that I have noticed and liked in many string quartets – but not all – is how no one instrument leads. They hand over the baton for the leading role to each other all the time. One instrument plays a phrase. Another responds, echoes, bounces it further – but it only follows this thread for a short while before it takes charge and introduces something new. Sometimes I get the impression that this is “a thing” for string quartets, and then some other one comes along (like the one by Linde) and I hear none of that in it, so then maybe it’s not. I have no musical education whatsoever, beyond what was mandatory in school, and they definitely didn’t go into this kind of detail about the characteristics of construction of different forms of classical music.

A ballet triple act.

Jerome Robbins’ “The Concert”. A comic piece depicting the audience of a piano concert (which is an actual piano concert being performed on the stage). In my opinion the piece has aged really badly. Its home is clearly in the 1950s, and I don’t understand why anyone would think this silent movie aesthetic was worth dusting off. I guess it was fresh and new when it came out, maybe? All I saw was people reduced to caricatures, and then ridiculed with no warmth. There’s the stern housewife, the cowed husband, the nerdy boy with big spectacles, the flirty hussy. All we’re missing is a plucky black mammy and a squinty-eyed chinaman, to make the collection of clichés complete. I always struggle with second-hand embarrassment but this actually made me angry.

Jerome Robbins’ “In the night”. Three episodes depicting three phases of love. Pretty but not particularly interesting. The piano music by Chopin was the best part of this evening.

George Balanchine’s “Theme and variations”. An artful, technically splendid display of skill and precision and grace, but to me it mostly felt artificial and contrived. There was no room for the dancers to show any personality or any expression other than a fixed, glued-on smile. I couldn’t help wondering if all the dancers had been chosen to match each other’s length and hairstyle.

All of these choreographies date from the second half of the 20th century, so I was expecting something a lot more modern.

We started both yesterday and today with luxurious breakfasts at a café that Ingrid had found online. Pluk on Berenstraat, in case you find yourself in that area. The online reviews are very mixed but we got very good food, though the service was rather slow.

We had seen enough canals and crooked houses and cute little streets yesterday and wanted something different today, so we went to the Rijksmuseum.

The museum was very visitor-friendly, with easy-to-read maps that guided people to the most popular paintings, but also to other parts of the collection. The popular works – like their one and only Van Gogh – had large crowds in front of them, so I didn’t even bother to try and look at those. There were plenty of other interesting things to see.

Even though we all walked in the same rooms, we often split up because of our diverging interests. Ingrid is interested in art and paints herself, so she looks at details and technical aspects that Adrian doesn’t care much about. So she and Eric (who also painted when he was young) looked at the paintings with artists’ eyes, while Adrian and I looked at them with general curiosity.

We noted, for example, the prevalence of grapes, glass bowls, and curls of lemon peel in 17th century still life paintings.

The curators at the Rijksmuseum had done a great job with the signage. All too often, museums label each work with its title, maker and year, and nothing more. Here there were often interesting background facts, and info sheets with even more facts and stories.

When we tired of paintings, we looked at cannons, porcelain, Delft pottery and ship models.

I liked this glass vase by Émile Gallé, with its irregular patterns borrowed from various cultures.

And this repeatedly darned sock, found in a seaman’s chest after a shipwreck.

From high culture to low. In the afternoon we took the boat to North Amsterdam to a large flea market that Ingrid wanted to browse for vintage clothing. She didn’t find anything that fit, but I bought a jacket.