Magnus Granberg & Skogen

Wednesday 26 November 2025 • 7pm

A man wearing glasses and a sweater sits indoors, looking to the side in a black and white photograph.

Photo: Anton Lukoszevieze

Celebrating their 20 year anniversary, Skogen perform the world premiere of Magnus Granberg’s Trouble, Had it All My Days (scored for 13 musicians) in the rarefied acoustics of Konserthuset's Grünewaldsalen. This new work takes an aria (Seufzer, Tränen, ängstlich sehnen) from Bachs’s cantata BWV 21, Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniß as its point of departure but borrows its title from the lyrics of a song by American blues singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt.

Skogen

Anna Lindal, violin
Eva Lindal, violin
Angharad Davies, violin
Leo Svensson Sander, cello
Heather Roche, clarinet
Finn Loxbo, guitar
Stina Hellberg Agback, harp
Magnus Granberg, prepared piano
Simon Allen, vibraphone and percussion
Erik Carlsson, percussion
Henrik Olsson, amplified objects
Petter Wästberg, contact microphone, mixer, loudspeaker
Toshimaru Nakamura, no-input mixing board

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Discounted 200 SEK tickets available for pensioners, students, etc. Free tickets for children under 16.

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This concert is made possible with support from STIM Forward Fund, Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, Stiftelsen Längmanska Kulturfonden, Kulturrådet and Stockholm City.

Magnus Granberg is a composer and performer working at an intersection between contemporary chamber music and improvisation. He is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Born in Umeå in 1974, he studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenburg and in New York in his late teens and early twenties. Self-taught as a composer, he formed his own ensemble Skogen in 2005 trying to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi.

His music has been performed in Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, England, Austria, Hungary and Slovenia, broadcast by public radio channels in England (BBC Radio 3 and 6), Germany (SWR 2), Sweden (SR P2), Estonia, Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary and the United States, and has been published by the renowned British record label Another Timbre.

https://magnusgranberg.se/

Led by pianist Magnus Granberg, Skogen is a Swedish ensemble working at an intersection between contemporary chamber music and improvisation. The music, which originates from the interplay between composition and improvisation and between individual and collective processes, is a poetical practice which in subtle and seemingly paradoxical ways unifies order with chaos, unity with diversity and the past with the present.

The ensemble has released seven CDs on the renowned British record label Another Timbre and has performed at festivals such as Ultima (NO), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Splitter Music Festival (DE) and Ulrichsberger Kaleidophon (AT).

The Swedish violinist Eva Lindal plays contemporary and improvised music.

She was a member of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1986 to 1998. During her years in the orchestra, Eva formed ties with the group Katzen Kapell and the contemporary group MA.

In 2020, Eva and her sister Anna Lindal released the duo recording Bäver, which was praised by international critics. In 2024, Eva and New York pianist Virg Dzurinko released their second duo album: Hotel at the End of the World.

Angharad Davies

Angharad Davies is a Welsh violinist based in London working with free-improvisation, compositions and performance.

Her approach to sound involves attentive listening and exploring beyond the sonic confines of her instrument, her classical training and performance expectation.

Much of her work involves collaboration. She has long standing duos with Tisha Mukarji, Dominic Lash and Lina Lapelyte and plays with Common Objects, Cranc and Skogen. She has been involved in projects with Tarek Atui, Tony Conrad, Richard Dawson, Gwenno, Roberta Jean, Jack McNamara, Rie Nakajima, Tim Parkinson, Eliane Radigue, Georgia Ruth and J.G.Thirlwell.

Most of her records are released on Another Timbre but she also has releases on Absinth Records, allthatdust, Confrontrecords, Emanem, Potlatch, NI VU Ni CONNU and winds measure recordings. Her first orchestral piece was commissioned by LCMF in 2019 : I ble'r aeth y gwrachod i gyd....?/ Where did all the witches go...? She has since been commissioned by Explore Ensemble: Sitting with Emptiness (2022); GBSR duo: Empty Spaces II (2023) and will be making new pieces for andPlay, Dominic Lash and Heather Roche in 2025.

www.angharaddavies.com

Stina Hellberg Agback

Stina Hellberg Agback is a harpist and composer known for her innovative approach to jazz. She has performed extensively throughout Scandinavia with groups like Namna, SHA3K, and Trilobit, as well as in collaborations with Eva Lindal and Jonas Isaksson.

Besides her own projects, Stina has played with a wide range of ensembles, including Mattias Risberg Mining Extended, Mariam the Believer, and 3 Glas. She's also a skilled orchestral musician, having performed with the Uppsala Chamber Orchestra and the Stockholm Wind Orchestra.

Stina has released acclaimed albums with Namna, SHA3K, and Trilobit, receiving positive reviews from publications like Downbeat, Orkesterjournalen, and Lira. Her music has also been featured in films and recordings by artists like Mattias Olsson, Matti Bye and I.B. Sundström.

Finn Loxbo

Finn Loxbo is a guitarist with a focus on free improvisation. His music is usually on either side of two dynamic extremes: quiet acoustic or very loud. On the quiet side we find him in his own ensemble Kommun, as a solo act and in collaborations with, for example, Skogen. Examples from the louder side are Kyosaku, Anna Högberg Extended Attack, and previously in bands such as Doglife, Strändernas svall and Fire! Orchestra.

www.finnloxbo.com

Henrik Olsson

Ever since he was the drummer and percussionist in legendary band gul3 (Yellow3 in English), Henrik Olsson have made great contributions to the field of experimental music in Sweden. As composer and improviser, his curiosity and open-minded musical thought has brought him to a rich world of musical textures, quite often realized electronically through amplified sounds and with silence as a natural part of the musical result.

Toshimaru Nakamura

Toshimaru Nakamura's instrument is the no-input mixing board, which describes a way of using a standard mixing board as an electronic music instrument, producing sound without any external audio input. The use of the mixing board in this manner is not only innovative in the the sounds it can create but, more importantly, in the approach this method of working with the mixer demands. The unpredictability of the instrument requires an attitude of obedience and resignation to the system and the sounds it produces, bringing a high level of indeterminacy and surprise to the music. Nakamura pioneered this approach to the use of the mixing board in the mid-1990's and has since then appeared on over one hundred audio publications, including nine solo CD's.

He has performed throughout Europe, North America, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, China, Singapore and Malaysia, performing and recording both as a soloist and in collaboration with numerous other musicians.