Review: 19 June 2009, Johan Lif, VLT

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Instead of presenting a completed show, the ensemble during several years' time has let the audience follow their work's creation at a series of open workshops.

Dream seminar gradually will become a chamber opera based on Tomas Tranströmer's poems.

At the Concert house yesterday they presented a cohesive hour long musical drama. How much we saw yesterday will be left when drömseminarium finally has its premiere in 2010 we don't know.

The Ensemble – with musicians especially from USA but also Sweden, Canada, Spain and France – is collectively trying and rejecting ideas during the creation workshops.

Since drömseminarium still is in creation it feels difficult, and also unfair, to write a regular review.

The dramatic elements yesterday were from time to time successful – as when the musicians and singers moved as a group in a low-key humorous choreography – and from time to time overdriven theatricalism.

Songs alternate between Swedish and English in a way that is sometimes irritating, and sometimes sets the words in an unexpected way.

Although the shape is changing it seems like the ensemble has found a tone and an interaction that functions, and that assures good things.

Ellen Lindquist's music is consistently excellent: spacious, but also dense and content-rich. Particularly striking is the suggestive tone setting of the poem Further In, where long chords are played over the piano-and marimba figures. Let us hope that this piece will stay for 2010.