Barometern 150629
By: MATS ANDERSSON
Concert
4+
Scene: Halltorp Inn
Audience: Approximately 850 people
Best: Jocke Berg’s Sweden, “Welcome, welcome here”
Worst: That it’s so hard for the audience to sit still! You do not get coffee and beer during a concert, period.
In other notes: Halltorp’s garden, a little gem as a concert venue.
Somehow the summer came to our region on Saturday evening. It was 20 plus at eight in the evening and Halltorps Inn’s garden had turned into a really summery picnic spot.
People were jostling with a chair in one hand and a picnic basket in the other to find a good spot to place the chair in.
It might as well be stated right now, Halltorps Inn’s garden is a really cozy place for concerts in the small format.
Perhaps this positive feeling largely is thanks to Helen Sjöholm and her band’s. Talk about mastering the art of spellbinding her audience. From the very first note to the last lines of the last encore, the mega hit You are my man, Helen Sjöholm wrapped the audience around her little finger.
With her on stage she had the quartet Martin Östergren, piano, Jojje Wadenius, guitar, Ulric Johansson, bass and Tomas Bergquist, drums, and we are talking really skilled musicians.
Not surprisingly it was the old Blood, Sweat and Tears hero, “Jojje” Wadenius, who took most space. His playful guitar performmance, both the soft and the little rockier, was a perfect complement to Helen Sjöholm’s voice.
When he and Helen Sjöholm together performed some of the songs that Jojje Wadenius and Barbro Lindgren made immortal – it can’t be – 46 years ago you could touch the atmosphere. Songs like My little child, A child I will have when I grow up and I’m the ugliest there is, are wonderful also in 2015.
Other parts of the concert that are glued in mind is the part with Swedish ballads and of course talk about and music from Kristina från Duvemåla.
That Helen Sjöholm is a supremely gifted singer, we knew already. But that Music in the summer evening contained such width, that was a real positive surprise. The song selection simply must have appealed to everyone in the audience, regardless of age and music interest.
For here there was a mixture of one second Jocke Berg and Staffan Hellstrand with Olle Adolfsson and Tomas Andersson Wij. The next second we were treated to Swedish ballads and sonnets by William Shakespeare, set to music by the band’s pianist, Martin Östergren.
The fact that it was Gabriellas sång and the concluding You are my man who got the crowd to both sing, sway and stand up in spontaneous sing-along, was more expected.
An extra additional rose to the small talks in between. It’s an art that far from all artists master but this evening the talks were both fun and well timed.