Ingfrid : In 2015, I dug out an album I’d listened to a great deal as a student: Barbara Bonney and Antonio Pappano’s recordings of Sibelius songs. I had been very fond of this album, but when I listened to it again twenty years later, I experienced a lot of it as foreign, different than I remembered. My taste and my ear had changed considerably in the course of these years, I had moved away from being a classical pianist, I had worked with un-learningthe romantic playing and instead exploring folk music and new forms of expression on the piano. I had searched through the dry, the intimate, the simple and developed a creative practice as a musician, focusing on adapting older material to new situations. As I was listening to the vibrato-laden Swedish-Finnish poetry verses, a sonic image emerged that awakened my curiosity. I had recently listened to Come Shine with Live Maria Roggen’s vocals. How would the Sibelius music sound if Live Maria Roggen was singing it and if we tried to peel away the Romantic clothing? I sent her a message.
I & L : Out of these initial experiences a number of questions arose that we had to pursue, going into the depth of expression, language, style and aesthetic and into the depth of interpretation. Can you un-dress one style and re-dress with another? Or what actually is the Romantic, and what would be the opposite; unRomantic? We quickly discovered that such reworking with style and expression can't happen without it having consequences for the form and content. So, an exploration of the (un)Romantic would necessarily be a simultaneous exploration of interpretation as a creative activity. For us, as performing composers or composing performers, improvisation was the natural method for working with this. Through repetitive investigation, involving ever new playing experiences with and encounters with every day's new versions of the music, we have built the music into our bodies and into the duo’s shared body. We have made musical elements and stories available to ourselves for continually new experiments with expression and form. The idea of the Romantic or the unRomantic came with a charged potential, a resistance and a challenge. What kind of music can emerge through our bodily work of attempting to understand and render this old music and these old poems, given who we are as musicians?
Live: For me, the first experience of playing Sibelius together was demanding, chaotic; difficult to connect to musical intuition. The feeling of hitting a wall, of hearing something that did not find its outlet. The frustration over not being able to use ‘my instrument’: if I sang in a microphone, the nuances between us disappeared. If I sang without it, the nuances in my own expression vanished. I remember our mutual determination to continue, continue playing, continue searching even though the glimpses of joy when something fell into place, were tiny and rare. But I guess it’s hard to judge what’s what, amidst all these memories – what has to do with my personal state at the time, what has to do with this being our initial encounter, what actually says anything about the musical possibilities? I really wish I could listen to these first attempts today!
