Dagens Nyheter 101012
By: LASSE GRANSTRAND
With the character ”Kristina from Duvemåla” Helen Sjöholm was transformed from an ”unknown find” to a musical star. Now she’s on in triplicate – at Stockholm’s City Theatre, with a new album and in ”Simon and the oaks” at the cinema the coming spring.
We meet in a recording studio at Roslagsgatan in Stockholm. Raw concrete in two cramped basement rooms. Unfortunately the toilet is out of order today so Helen Sjöholm has to refrain [from doing her needs]. She can’t come further away than that from the glamor and standing ovations at Carnegie Hall in New York (”Kristina” September 2009) or Royal Albert Hall in London (April 2010).
Helen Sjöholm is recording an album with music and translated lyrics of the American singer Billy Joel. Perhaps best known for the song ”Just the way you are”. The album is released in November and most of the work is done. Today it’s about deciding which versions out of several recordings that should be used and how they should be mixed together.
– This is how you do it nowadays, Helen says with a small smile, you don’t need to be able to sing.
Well, it all sounds perfect. But Helen Sjöholm and producer Gunnar Nordén hear the nuances. They listen and cut, change their minds and change them again.
– The first take is often the best one, says Gunnar.
– Listen, Helen says, here I’m too fuzzy. Sometimes it’s hard to work with us singers, huh? It becomes a mental thing that you have to cut and change even if it’s good enough. A studio disease. In the end one tires of oneself.
– No, Gunnar says. It’s easy to work with you.
One of the songs is called ”The Entertainer”. I point to a line that could be a summarization of her life: ”Today I am a star that no one can pull down.” But her favorite lines come a bit later in the song: ”I’m an entertainer and I have not sold my soul. Maybe bargained a bit now and then when I was close behind large catches and a standing ovation.”
– My career has not followed a plan, it hasn’t been strategic. I have gone by feelings and intuition, not on the credits. Some thought that doing revue was wrong for me, but it was great fun at The China Theatre with Lasse Berghagen, Magnus Härenstam, Loa Falkman and Sissela Kyle. I learned a lot about timing and daring to rely on the comic side of me.
– ”You are my man” is a pastiche of a dance band song. I’m not completely comfortable having that as headline for my entire artistic life. Played with Benny Andersson’s 16-man orchestra it is funny. With a lone pianist it doesn’t get that playful. But the audience always require me to do it. I was surprised that it got so big. Presumably it’s because it’s an unconditional declaration of love for a man.
Into the studio to polish [the recording]. Helen Sjöholm’s voice becomes overwhelmingly powerful in the crowded room.
– In my voice there is a hopeful clarity that I sometimes want to get away from. I want to broaden the expression.
It’s been eight years since Helen Sjöholm released an album and she’s been pondering for a long time on what to record. When she was on parental leave with Ruben, now three years old, she tried to write her own songs.
– It didn’t work that time. I became too self-critical. If you get offers to sing compositions of Benny Andersson and Stefan Nilsson, it’s difficult to come along with your own stuff.
She was searching for good material. Ultimately it was her husband David Granditsky, sound technician at Hamburger Börs, who played a list of songs including Billy Joel’s from the 70-, 80- and the 90’s. Helen had found her material.
From early on Helen Sjöholm became aware of the power of her voice. She was four years old and went with her grandmother to the retirement home to see her great grandfather. Helen noticed how happy the old got. Felt the respons, that it meant something when she sang her sad, dramatic chapbook songs about diseased and lonely girls.
In her father’s sheet metal workshop home in Sundsvall, she could try the tone and strength of her voice after all the workers had gone home for the day. The resonance was excellent and she spent several hours singing there, while cleaning the workshop on her father’s assignment.
Helen Sjöholm soon became part of Sundsvall’s rich choir life. Even though she would rather sing solo. But the question to get an education in music never arose.
– Where I come from the law of Jante rules and there’s an attitude that you have to work with something firm. It may seem a bit weird that you work hard and rehearse, but without any visible results until after ten weeks. My father and my mother both have good voices and sang during the time I was growing up, but there was no tradition to engage in cultural expression forms. They thought I should get a “real” education.
So Helen went to the social science programme in high school. Later on she applied three times for The Theatre University in Malmö and Stockholm, but was not admitted. She toured with a band, got parts in plays at Malmö City Theatre. She let go of her dreams to have a life as an artist for a while and studied culture at Stockholm University. Then she took part in Enskedespelet and had the lead role in a play by Dickens, ”Little Dorrit”. The music was written by Mats Nörklit, brother of Mona Nörklit who is married to Benny Anderson. He was there and heard Helen Sjöholm sing in the tent in Margaretaparken in Enskede.
He had his eyes on her.
– I was to sing a song from Chess on Swedish Television and he came to the rehearsal at Berns [theatre house]. I almost/could have wet myself I was so nervous.
The auditions for ”Kristina from Duvemala” was a big organisation that was carried out in several parts of the country with thousands of applicants. Helen Sjöholm was the chosen one.
– It was probably the greatest happening of my artistic life, to stand beside the piano in Benny’s home and be there when he finished the role of Kristina.
It took a long time before Helen Sjöholm felt that she wanted to call herself an artist.
– Sometimes that feeling of not having enough knowledge struck me. I couldn’t say: This is my job, I am good at this. For a long time I just said: Now I’m doing this, then we’ll see. Those of us who don’t have a formal education probably feel a bit like amateurs all our lives. I don’t have the same credentials those who have been to theatre- or music school. I don’t read notes straight off the sheet, but I have a good ear.
Helen Sjöholm has grown thicker skin over the years. She has more trust in herself, even if she is still stressed about not knowing if she will suffice.
When Helen Sjöholm was a little girl she enjoyed the direct response to her singing. And it has continued that way.
– I want an immediate response and perhaps that has made me lazy sometimes. It should be pleasurable. If it’s been up hill I have given up on some projects.
But surely she has tackled tough challenges. She’s not mainly thinking about when she was fifteen and was the local talent wanting to sing a duet with a moderately amused Tommy Körberg, whose Sweden tour had reached Sundsvall. He was the idol that many years later became her co-star in The Oscars Theatre’s adaptation of “My Fair Lady”.
– He was tired of all the girls showing up, wanting to sing with him wherever he went. He had no desire to rehearse and I can understand that.
No, Helen Sjöholm wants to talk about The Epiphany Concert this year at Berwaldhallen. There she once again was the local talent. She sang a Mozart Aria, on live television, with perhaps the world’s most cherished male opera singer, Bryn Terfel.
– I was such an egg to say yes! I trained hard with a vocal coach and afterwards I was glad I dared to do it, but I could have done it better.
Helen Sjöholm didn’t have to worry. As usual she received appreciative criticism.
There are rehearsals of “Aniara” at the City Theatre’s big stage in Stockholm. The theater celebrats its 50th anniversary with the Nobel laureate Harry Martinson’s poem suite from 1956. The music is newly written by Andreas Kleerup, who usually works with Robyn. Lars Rudolfsson who is directing calls the poem a revue of man in space and time.
Helen Sjöholm is literally the representative face of the production. Her face in white makeup has been seen by many stockholmers in ads, brochures, on posters and on the theatre’s facade.
She plays Poetissan. A blind woman whose role grows during the performance. “Aniara” is a serious story.
– It’s brave of the City Theatre to choose this piece to their 50th anniversary, says Helen Sjöholm. A timeless story of existence, death, environmental destruction and about creating a meaning while being in the midst of insecurity. Everyone dies.
Helen Sjöholm tries on clothes during a break. A simple gray dress.
– I usually wear rather un-sexy clothes, she giggles. Homespun and clogs and things like that. In “My Fair Lady” it begins like that, as usual, but at least it ends up with an evening toilette.
There are 23 actors on the City Theatre stage. A big ensemble with veterans like Sven Wollter, Ingvar Hirdwall, Marika Lindström and Claire Wikholm. Now they all dance ecstatically in an attempt to forget their fate in the cold, sterile and empty space.
But Helen Sjöholm is in a world of her own while carrying, with an unseeing gaze, a glass box with soil around. All passengers have been requested to bring soil for cultivating during the long journey and the evacuation to a new planet. Soon the atmosphere turns into “open crying that no one tries to conceal anymore”. The passengers have realized what has happened, the spaceship has been thrown out of course.
Helen Sjöholm is restrained with her body language. Poetissan is blind but that should not be evident from the start.
– She hears the turmoil and grief in the others’ voices and she comforts herself and the others. It’s exciting to consider the way a blind person moves. How the other senses take over.
”Aniara” will run four nights a week. But after “Kristina from Duvemåla” nothing could be as exhausting.
Kristina was on for five years. For a long time Helen Sjöholm did six shows a week.
– I sang for several hours every night. It became my school, I expanded my tone range both upwards and downwards. On the Mondays off, I was completely exhausted. Cried, ate candy and mostly wanted to be in bed. Kristina contains a wide span of emotions and many years of her life. It moves you deeply. Eventually the performances per week got fewer. When it was over it got empty. I was exhausted.
At the end of the first act of“Aniara” Poetissan begins to sing and tell her story: “I learned the big scream of Braille in the faces I touched with my hand, now I’m a singer in the third hall and shall never return to my land.”
In the second act a cult is formed around her. The people have left a destroyed Earth and their spaceship “Aniara” is heading towards a certain death. Poetissan stands for spirituality and solace.
It’s the fifth time Helen Sjöholm is working with director Lars Rudolfsson. But that does not automatic mean safety.
– He is fantastic and scary to work with, he keeps everything open. He has no set answers if you ask him. He has trust in our own impulses and our own curiosity.
Where’s Helen Sjöholm going after she has left the spaceship?
Her answer is: maybe to the movies. She wants to do more. The movie “As it is in Heaven” was a big success.
– Many critics thought it was too greedy and pretentious. I thought it was bold in its extravagancy. From the first day of shooting we simply were this choir, welded together. Director Kay Pollak was stubborn, demanding and intense. It made me reach the uttermost limit of my ability.
One year ago Helen Sjöholm was contacted by a casting director for the movie version of Marianne Fredriksson’s novel “Simon and the oaks.” Helen did audition shooting for several days. She was casted as the mother Karin and shot throughout the spring, from February to May.
– With movies you don’t know if it got any good until long after when you see the result. It’s unfamiliar and a bit nervous.
Another answer to what Helen Sjöholm’s future looks like can be found in the executive’s corridor on the 7th floor of the City Theatre. After the rehearsal she is summoned to the CEO of the theatre Benny Fredriksson. Before she disappears into the manager’s corner office she says:
– Maybe it’s something new going on, but you never know if it will happen. That’s the way of this business.