G.P.

De Geerhallen in Norrköping where I conducted my Swedish debut

After my brief holiday in Finland I traveled to Norrköping, Sweden for my first concert of the season. I hadn't conducted in Sweden before so I was very excited to go there. Coincidentally, Norrköping Symphony Orchestra was also the first music directorship of my current boss in Cleveland, Franz Welser-Möst!

My first realization upon arrival was how similar Sweden is to Finland. The town, its boulevards, parks and buildings look exactly the same. They have trams just like we have in Helsinki, and people speak language I can understand. And what cheered me up the most was the private sauna in my hotel room - Swedes sure know how to take care of a Finnish conductor!

The orchestra's home De Geerhallen has good acoustics and I was also very happy how the orchestra sounded and how smoothly our rehearsals went. I did my best to brush up my rusty Swedish and rehearsed in Swedish as much as I could. Our program was Holst's The Planets which was done with a visualization projected on a screen behind the orchestra. We did a similar thing last year in Cleveland with Hans Graf when I was assigned to direct the offstage chorus. What a great experience to prepare me to conduct the whole work! It is not an easy task to coordinate the orchestra and the chorus in the last movement, Neptune. Luckily we did it well in the concert and the whole evening was a big hit. I am looking forward to our next concert together - hopefully soon!

UPDATE - We had two nice reviews in the local press, in Folkbladet and Norrköpings Tidningar (in Swedish).