Few modern Swedish composers have taken so much interest in solo songs like Maurice Karkoff and few have, like Karkoff, managed to achieve continual personal renewal in the genre and found their own distinctive musical means to express the individual qualities of the selected poems. Karkoff has an intimate knowledge of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry. This time, Karkoff has chosen a couple of short haiku-like poems, and these songs have become a kind of independent vocal poem. Nelly Sachs’ poem Gråt ut he has already set to music; it appears in the original German (“Weine aus”) as the last song in Glühende Rätsel and in Gunnar Ekelöf’s translation in the collection Flykt och förvandling (1997). Now, in this reinterpretation of the Ekelöf version, it has received a lighter, almost visionary treatment, in which the closing vocalising seems to bring a promise of hope after all. 

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Joakim Sandgren likes to employ abstract processes in his compositions. His scores, which often contain microtonality, can be richly detailed and require abnormal playing techniques. Instrument contondant is described by Sandgren as “sound music” without harmonies: a kind of note-based electroacoustic music. 

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Mikael Forsman (b. 1968) is a composer and guitarist. The spontaneity and directness of his music is often juxtaposed with its soft delicateness, as regards both his writing and his technique. "Oui, för violin!" comprises seventy fragments distributed over ten pages, with seven staves on each. By placing the sheets beside each other, the violinist can play a selection in any order he or she chooses or in their normal sequence. 

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The Italian title, Volo, means “flight”, as in flight and movement or the bow’s flight over the strings. Jörgen Dafgård’s composition is playfully and riotously rhythmic and contains powerful dynamics and minimalistic passages. 

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When the Chimes end is a tribute to the barren and taciturn world of the western movie. It consists partly of excerpts from several well known films and is an attempt to blend two different worlds – the Western and contemporary art music – into something hopefully new and never heard of. It is not a story but rather a chain of images and situations with dramatic flow and two guitars which add, comment and embellish.  

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Der Sprung über den Schatten – “The Leap over the Shadow” – is a title that most of would probably associate with an opera by Ernst Krenek. In his work of the same name, Staffan Storm makes, in fact, no reference in any musical sense to the Krenek opera; instead, we should see the title as a kind of metaphor for what the music is trying to achieve. “Der Sprung über den Schatten is simply brilliant in its amalgamation of structural complexity and transparency, and dazzles with its richness of content and powers of suggestion. Thanks to the precision instrumentation, its host of expressive figures never feels crowded, and no sound or movement is too curious or strange to be penned by Storm and realised with ten instruments.” Nutida Musik 

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CANTUS LINNAEI - subtitled Diaphonia 3 – is a dialogue between the poles of symbiosis and autonomy, with striking touches of unison, melodic flight and fight! CANTUS LINNAEI was commissioned by flautist Mats Möller and guitarist Johannes Möller for a summer tour during the Linneus commemorative year of 2007. The work had its original performance on 26 June in Stenbrohult Church – Linneus’s own childhood village church – since which time it has been performed at a number of other places in Sweden.  

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Tomis – Metamorphoses for string quartet, op. 65 was composed in 2002. In this work the metamorphoses tries to describe how Ovid – the poet of love and metamorphosis – himself was changed by his imprisonment in the city of Tomis. The different movements show Ovid’s changing attitudes – sadness, then rebellion, emotion, teasing, hardening… Finally, he grows so strong that he can stoically bear his fate without being broken. 

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Madeleine Isaksson’s music comments, associates and expresses atmospheres through a singular, developed language. “There’s something going on, something that has matured and that expresses itself in a musical form.” The quote is telling, and is applicable not only to the individual works, but also to Madeleine Isaksson’s whole attitude towards creation. Rum (“Rooms”) was first performed in Stockholm in 1999 (parts 1 and 2) and has subsequently been performed in its complete version in Göteborg, Copenhagen, Vienna and under the 2003 Stockholm New Music Festival. 

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Per Henrik Wallin (1946-2005) was a jazz legend even during his own lifetime. He is regarded as by far the most impulsive jazz pianists and composers Sweden has ever produced. His style has been branded as uncompromising, masterly, and violent, but there is also an intimacy and a poetry, as revealed in this collection of piano compositions: pure jazz tunes, little gems, miniatures in a tradition rooted in Beethoven’s Bagatelles. 

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In this piece a connecting link between the future and the past is constructed – the flute and percussion are set against the organ’s occasionally modal, archaic character. 

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Sonata scura for string orchestra was written in 1988. This “dark sonata” – in four movements – was commissioned by the Camerata Roman (today Camerata Nordica) and was premiered by them in October 1989 with the composer conducting. The work was revised in 2005. 

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Treccia for violoncello solo (1993) is one in a series of solo compositions, all of them with the title Treccia. Previous publications on Edition Suecia are Treccia for guitar solo and Minotaur Labyrinth – Treccia for percussion solo. 

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