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This is Caprice Records’ second issue in their promising series Improvisational, which is produced in an unusual setting, with a set of defined parameters. One ingredient is the hour of recording: in the dead of night. Some producers would do this to avoid extraneous sounds from outside the recording space, and I wish some who didn’t would have. I vividly recall my frustration at hearing roaring 18-wheelers gear up inside J. S. Bach’s Sonatas & Partitas for Solo Violin on a recording with Gidon Kremer on a Philips recording back in the 1990s. Fortunately, the company accepted my demur to this, and I returned the box. Another bad example was another recording of the same work, on Channel Classics by Rachel Podger. That one was even worse than Kremer’s, because a lot of edits had been done, and those edits brutally cut off the murmur of accelerating or down-winding motor vehicles. I spoke to the executive of the label, and reluctantly he accepted that he had a problem, and in a tone of sarcasm he promised me he would conduct his next recording in an abandoned church in Northern Sweden. I wish he would, because he destroyed Rachel Podger’s otherwise wonderful recordings of Bach. There are a few things the reader needs to know about the backdrop of these recordings of Vreeswijk improvisations and about Mats Öberg. Firstly, Cornelis Vreeswijk (1937 – 1987), who originated in Holland, is by now an icon for the people of Sweden, almost to the degree of Evert Taube (1890 – 1976), but with another set of precursory signs. He was one of the most gifted troubadours and singer-songwriters of the Swedish 20th century, and as such he occupies his very special place in people’s hearts. He burst upon the scene heavily in 1968 with the LP that paved the way for him into the greater fame; Tio vackra visor och Personliga Person - but he made his debut with another LP in 1964, which eventually sold gold. He had many sides to his artistic and personal character (which merged!). He was the sensitive, introverted poet, and the gargantuan drinker and rowdy troublemaker, all in one, and his songs were the loveliest and most vulnerable love ballads as well as the harshest and most relentless political satires. He had a great wingspan, this fierce and moody angel with tainted wings… The pianist Mats Öberg – now in his mid thirties – is one of the most talented pianists of the day, well known for his knack at improvisation. A fact that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the ascetic text that can be found in the CD booklet, is that Öberg is blind since birth. This is quite an important bit of information, at least the way I see it. I used to know another guy who was blind from birth as well, meaning he had no idea what light was, what color is, and so forth – but he lived a life extremely rich with nuances and perceptual impressions, because his hearing and touch developed into a sublime state of sensitivity. For a pianist, this is of course especially true, and for an improvising pianist, all the more – because piano improvisation is all about touch and hearing. Memory is another skill that talented blind people develop into a state of the art realm. My blind friend had thousands of compact cassettes on shelves around his walls; music cassettes. Once I asked him why he hadn’t marked them with Braille. You know, it looked completely whacky to me to see all those thousands of blank, unmarked spines of cassettes, white and anonymous, brooding on their musical content, hidden away from me, the only person in the room with eyesight! My friend simply replied: “I thought it’d be better to just remember where the music was”. And he did. He could tell me what it was that he picked out of the shelf, and it would always be correct! When it comes to Mats Öberg’s improvisations on Cornelis Vreeswijk, I immediately get caught in the flow of his great musicality. Had I never heard Vreeswijk’s songs, I’d still be as caught up in these meandering musical thoughts and reflections, because after a while – though I, like so many Swedes, know Vreeswijk’s oeuvre by heart – I tend to forget that I hear Vreeswijk compositions, improvised upon. Now and then I get reminded, by a hue, by a nuance or a trickling flow of familiarity, but soon I ascend into an elevated atmosphere of tones that break like the waves of the sea in sunlight, producing a mindset of reflecting recollections that call attention to the here and the now, on the vanishing backdrop of the past, which recedes at breakneck speed below the horizon of events. Mats Öberg’s way of improvising on these songs in such a manner that you, much of the time, just lose yourself in the liberating perception of good art and sound without thinking about these songs that Öberg’s playing originates in, is a great achievement – and he surprises me a lot. I get a new sense of what improvisation can be. This way, Mats Öberg also provides a completely new way of hearing Vreeswijk, nudging him into the wider scope of classical music, classical composition, much the way the new movie about Bob Dylan (I’m Not There) really changes the focus onto Dylan as the great composer and songwriter that he is, behind the enfant terrible façade that fans have bestowed upon him. Let me listen through a few of the examples on Caprice’s CD: Track 1. Felicia – adjö [5:22] This, being one of my favorite Vreeswijk songs, from the breakthrough collection that I mentioned above, from 1968, is beautifully rendered in an original start-up, with the pianist slapping the body of the grand piano, in a percussive expressivity that lays the foundation for the welling forth of the piano tones in a repetitious figure that all Vreeswijk connoisseurs know well. As a couple of these recurring, beloved beads of notes build a fragile mood of loss and love, love and loss (inherent in the original song), the hand on hardwood percussion returns, finally leading us out into silence by way of its simplicity as the last piano chord thins out into time beyond. Beautiful, clever, genially simple! Track 8. Saskia [7:14] By chance, Saskia is another tune from Vreeswijk’s 1968 album, and here Mats Öberg’s introduction is equally inventive, playing the strings of the piano directly, hands on inside the hull, thus combining a kind of avant-garde performance practice with the rippling pianism of, say, a Liszt or even… a Lubomyr Melnyk (The Canadian/Swedish/Ukrainian composer who lives in Skoldinge, Sweden, creating his “continuous music). My conclusion, for sure, is that Caprice’s improvisational venture has followed up the promising beginning with Niklas Sivelöv’s improvisations on Bellman with a great success; Mats Öberg’s improvisations on Vreeswijk. And I forgot to mention: The pianists in this series get their material upon which to improvise just prior to the recording, so these are, indeed, improvisations on the spur of the moment; a nocturnal moment in Stockholm, when the spirits dance way up under the ceiling and the walls stand back to allow for unconditional space.  |
