GT 100530
By: MAGNUS HAGLUND
Photo: LISA BJÖRK
There is thunder and lightning in the meeting between Helen Sjöholm and Freddie Wadling in Gothenburg Opera performance A Touch of Taube. And another Taube is visible: the adventurer, transnational.
But who is Evert Taube to us; the national singer or globetrotter, or a nature lyricist? If you look at Eino Hanski’s marble version that stands at the wharf in Gothenburg, not far from opera house’s entrance, he is a compressed provincial writer. The statue radiates absolutely nothing to the sense of freedom or life intoxication, which are the most important elements in Taube’s songs and books. Taube was someone who escaped from the local, first as a bohemian artist who lived in Stockholm, and then out into the world, when going to sea. Even if he was born on Stora Badhusgatan, a few steps away from the Opera House, he became a citizen of the world.
But what about the inside of the Opera then? Will adventurous opportunities be presented when Freddie Wadling, Helen Sjöholm and Fredrik Lycke take the songs into the show A Touch of Taube, supported by the Gothenburg Opera choir, children’s choir and orchestra? It could so easily turn into a flop. Nice and trivial, or even worse: theatrical and over-the-top.
But it isn’t, thanks to Freddie Wadling’s and Helen Sjöholm’s sparkling presence. They know how to use the small gestures rather than to overdo it . Like when Freddie sings “So shimmering was never the sea”: suddenly we hear the words, what is actually said in the phrase “while you drown all my sorrows, darling, in your first kiss.” The blue grief, the shimmering that is there for a brief moment only and then becomes a melancholic memory. Absolutely top class. Or when Helen Sjöholm sings Jussi Björling’s classic “At Sea” and makes it into a prudent jazz ballad, with a painful Chet Baker-feeling. She sings incredibly well, arch-professional, but has a kind of sharpness in phrasing that goes under the skin. Damn, I can feel it.
Yes, there are a lot of songs from other sources in this conception, as more associative links to the sea theme. For example, the “Blue for Two” classic “Ships”, which becomes a powerful experience, as Procol Harum’s “A Salty Dog” by Freddie in front of an incredible authority. Sea dreaming Taube, adventure stories and tales’ author, he let his hands wander along the world map and fantasized about other places, other times. Here you will come close to Taube by thinking of him, as much as hearing him. The imaginary song writer, the exact negligence which knew exactly where the phrases would go. It is a Taube, who rarely appears in the current Event Gothenburg with its Ferris wheel just outside the Opera House. He is of course too indefinite, too passionated, too many things at once. But that is precisely what is highlighted in the unlikely and obvious meeting between Helen Sjöholm and Freddie Wadling: magic in the melodies and the individual words that give us the courage and longing, and eventually lead us out into the world.