I went to see Liljevalchs’s spring art salon together with Adrian and Ingrid.

I’ve always moved through the rooms in a counter-clockwise direction, because that’s the direction that’s straight forward from the entrance. That’s put the room with the under-eighteens’ works as the first one. Ingrid and Adrian confidently steered us in the opposite direction, because that was obviously the right way to go in their mind. It does actually make more sense this way, because now we started in a spacious hall of eye-catching sculptures and large paintings.

The works at the salon are all for sale, at a price set by the artist. Some, I think, price them so as to be almost sure that they won’t sell. Others are very affordable. Some look expensive to me but then turn out to have been sold nevertheless. (There’s a board in one of the rooms with sticker dots marking what’s been sold and what hasn’t.)

One of glass sculptures above, which I rather liked, had been sold for a sweet 95,000 SEK.

This one-metre sculpture of a submarine was made of metal and wood, and had been aged underwater for three years, according to the label. (Nils Lagergren, “Belgravia”.)

I wonder how this work of neon tubes and black paint on the wall was even presented to the jury, and how it can have been transported here. (Josefin Eklund, “Mysterious goats and geometric heads”.)

There were of course not just weird sculptures but also paintings of all kinds. I liked this pair of very realistic but dreamy views of a spring forest. (Mats Nörle, “Ekbacken om våren”.)

Ingrid taught me about underpainting, and how it is often done in red or orange. (Anna-Christina Eriksson, “Picnic With a Red Cadillac”.)

I’m always curious about textile works – there’s almost always some embroidery and textile sculpture, sometimes weaving or crochet or knitting. The embroidery works usually tend to be concrete depictions of people or stories, which, yeah, I know other people like, but it’s not my thing. This year I liked this Sami-inspired piece of embroidery on tulle. (Yvonne Larsson, “Blodsband”.) There were, in general, quite a lot of Sami-themed works.

This piece was pleasing in its geometric simplicity. It looked like embroidery at first, but was acrylic paint on fabric. (Juanma Gonzalez, “Död ved ger nytt liv _ ad#07”.)

There were several intricate, lifelike bronze sculptures, including these coltsfoot flowers. (Vera Burkhalter Zornat, “Tussilago”.)

Finally, someone had painted a view of the exact same pillars of the Årstabron bridge that I photographed yesterday.

The piano recital series at Konserthuset. Pierre-Laurent Aimard with Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part 2. Lovely, but also rather intense, with 140 minutes of focused listening. I was running out of energy towards the end and maybe a little bit less enraptured with the last four pairs or so.

Several parties in the rows in front of me left in the interval. I absolutely support walking out of a concert that isn’t doing it for you (if you can do it without interrupting). Still, it surprised me, that someone would choose to do so with this particular work. To me, this was – well, not quite the easiest music to listen and enjoy, but definitely not one that takes a real effort (like John Cage). You get a theme nicely and clearly presented at the beginning of every fugue and then you can follow it around all its twists and turns, like a guided tour.

Ingrid and I went to see The Subterranean Sky – surrealist art from the collections of Moderna Museet.

We were confused and disappointed. Most of the works exhibited were not actually examples of surrealism, or at least not what we thought surrealism to be. Maybe we’re not educated enough.

There were some works of obvious, well-known surrealists such as Dali and Magritte, and Bunuel. And a rather bizarre umbrella clad in sponges. I have to wonder if the sponges looked so dead and brown and close to disintegrating into dust when the work was first made.

But then a whole lot of what I would have called abstractionism and dadaism: drawings generated automatically by the artist’s hands as they were shaken during a train ride; lines depicting nothing. One of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Why were they there? No idea.

Robert Rauschenbergs “Mud muse” was, in my opinion, also not surrealism, but it was at least kind of fascinating. A pool of liquid mud that bubbled and erupted at seemingly random moments. The eruptions were energetic enough that the pool was surrounded by a splash zone with small dried spots of mud. It turned out to be not random but triggered by sound. I was hoping that meant sound detectors, but no, it was controlled by a recording that was, disappointingly, not even made audible.

So… yeah. Not very impressed.

Vivaldi at Konserthuset. I had been more or less resolved to not continue with the Baroque concert series next season, but this was so great that it’s making me reconsider.

Cirkus Cirkör with The Extraordinary History of Circus at Södra Teatern.

Cirkus Cirkör is usually good and sometimes excellent. This particular show was marketed as “a vibrant family show” and “fast-paced and humourous”, which could mean a whole lot of different things, including cringeworthy childish nonsense. It’s gotten rave reviews in media, though, so I gave it a last-minute chance.

It turned out to be utterly fabulous. Quite unlike most of their other performances that I’ve seen, which have been more conceptual and minimalist, this was silly and vibrant and sensitive and emotional and fun.

A tour through the history of circus, in reverse chronological order, jumping from the early days of Cirkus Cirkör itself in the 1990s, to European travelling circuses in the 1970s, to Barnum & Bailey around 1900. Then leaping onwards to the late 18th century and Philip Astley as the origin of modern circus. But no – circus has its roots in medieval jesters. No, go further back, to the orchestrated battles and beast shows of Rome. And further back than that: humans have probably been throwing things in the air for fun since the dawn of time.

The artists evoked the atmosphere of each of these points in circus history through storytelling, miniatures, re-enactment, sound, light, and costume changes. The steam train of Barnum & Bailey, followed by the circus artists parading through the town. Hobby horses and sound effects for the horse shows of Philip Astley. Giving the audience (soft) toy vegetables to throw at the jesters when they’re not funny enough. And actual circus acts interspersed with all that. It sounds kind of silly but was so well done that I was laughing out loud.

I want to hand out extra brownie points to the cast’s dialect coach! I’m not an expert but I’m sensitive to Swedish accents in English. This crew was switching smoothly and believably from the patter of an American circus presenter to crisp, posh British English for 1790s London – with no fumbling and no Swenglish. Absolutely the cherry on top of the whole show.

Here are a couple of press photos, copyright Sara P Borgström:

The focus of Kyoto Museum of Crafts and Design is a permanent exhibition of seventy-four traditional crafts of the Kyoto region. These cover a wide range of very different crafts – woodworking, weaving, fabric dying, the making of singing bowls, the carving of funerary sculptures, etc.

With seventy-four crafts to display in a single room, there’s a limit to how much space each one can get. Some are just displays of particularly exquisite examples of the craft, but many are explained in a lot of detail, such as step-by-step displays of the process of making wooden doll, or exhibits showing the various techniques of dying kimono fabric. The focus was on the craftsmanship and the process. I could happily have walked through three times the space to see more detail of each of the crafts.

There were also multiple hands-on exhibits, where you could try wrapping different kinds of items in a furoshiki cloth, or enjoy the sounds of a tuned series of singing bowls.

Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park. Art and historical objects from Japan and other parts of Asia. We focused on Honkan, the main building with Japanese artefacts.

These two sculptures of dancing figures from the 6th century were the oldest items I saw. They are so old that they become new again. They make me think of Modigliani. Art has gone around the full circle.

A lot of the older artwork displayed was religious in nature – Buddha statues, buddhist saints and demons. It can be technically impressive, but the highly stylized iconography, all full of symbolism, feels so impersonal.

Old pottery with its wabi-sabi aesthetic was the opposite of impersonal. The maker’s hands are so present. It’s amazing that something so fragile has survived for four hundred years.

I’ve never done any pottery, but these pieces make me want to try it myself.

With this painted folding screen, we’re back to refined symbolism again.

Taking a break to rest our legs. This foyer at the back of the museum had beautiful walls and beautiful light.

Jan Lundgren and Hans Backenroth at Konserthuset, playing tunes from Jan Johansson’s Jazz på svenska. Absolutely wonderful. Music that I know and love, expert musicians enjoying themselves together, and me in a front row seat. It doesn’t get more perfect than this.

Cirkus Cirkör with Ingrid and Adrian, at Dansens Hus. Tipping Point involved a lot of climbing and balancing on teetering structures of steel pipes. I liked the tensegrity-based designs a lot.

The most stunning part was a trapeze number, both visually and in terms of skill. Had I been their official photographer, knowing the programme and the timing in advance, being able to position myself optimally in the hall, I know exactly what moments I would have tried to capture, and what angles. It was so obvious that I went to their press photos looking for that obvious best shot – and it just wasn’t there. Obviously what was obvious to me was not obvious to others.

Picture this, but with plenty more space below them to show the height, and shot from further to the right so you get the artists more clearly in profile for that pure and elegant graphical curve: