Kerstin Jeppsson studied one grade above me in high school. I can’t say I remember her well, but we were around each other – if she didn’t attend the girl’s school, a block away in the direction of the Castle; Nyköpingshus. This was in the first part of the 1960s in the small, rural town of Nyköping, Sweden, and we went to this stately old school which had a pupils’ paper called Spridaren (The Diffuser), a social democratic club called HALSDUK (Högre Allmänna Läroverkets Socialdemokratiska Ungdomsklubb), a rightwing club that I can’t remember the name of and a pacifist club named PERUK (Pacifistiska Elevers Radikala Ungdomsklubb).

Kerstin Jeppsson and I walked those marble stairs and endured those same teachers, and for those readers who may have a more profound interest in that particular period of the life of Smalltown Sweden, from the viewpoint of intellectual youths, I recommend Veri Similia; a 24-chapter account of the Sixties in Nyköping, Sweden! (In Swedish, though…)

Kerstin Jeppsson left her hometown sooner than later, and established herself in Stockholm. She studied at the Royal College of Music 1968 - 1973 to become a music teacher, but she also studied as a singer, a vocal pedagogue and a conductor. She went on to compositional studies with Maurice Karkoff, and following his advice she went to study with Krzysztof Meyer and later Krzysztof Penderecki at the Conservatory of Krakow in Poland.
These were seriously progressive times in Sweden (and of course all of Europe), when you were supposed to be a fulltime participants in all kinds of leftist activities, and to study classical or contemporary art music must have been regarded by most young people as highly conservative and counter-productive, so I can only imagine the kind of attitudes Kerstin Jeppsson must have met back then, from her fellow youths.

Jeppsson’s studies reveal an interesting development indeed. She finished them as a Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, California, where she had composition teachers such as Mel Powell and Morton Subotnick.

Jeppsson’s association with teachers as far and wide apart as Krzysztof Penderecki and Morton Subotnick would vouch for a thoroughly original experience – and Kerstin Jeppsson has indeed found her own musical expression, stubbornly staying with her own convictions, without as much as glancing at trends or currents of the times. She is an original voice in the hustle and bustle of contemporeana; one of a rare kind.

Kerstin Jeppsson makes no secret of her deeper involvement in the experience of existence, which she furthers with studies in social anthropology and the science of religion.

The first work presented on this CD – Impossible (tracks 1 – 5) for chamber ensemble and alto solo – is based on texts by the truly original Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi. The work was commissioned by the Ny Musikk Ensemble in Oslo, Norway, and it materialized while Kerstin Jeppsson commuted back and forth between Krakow and Stockholm. She collaborated on the work with the poet. The text originates in his poetry collection The Impossible (1975).

The first sound that emerges in the largo espressivo of track 1 really does just that; emerges! It’s a swelling high-hat, and from that single swelling and diminishing silver the voice of the alto rises; cool and aloof, yet close and intense:

The atmosphere is immediate, in no doubt, and anyone can sense it. It is palpable. There is a fateful force of the relentless circumstances of the ground rules of existence at play in this sound world of Kerstin Jeppsson and the alto; Ingrid Tobiasson.
Gradually the chamber orchestra starts sounding its instruments in different places in the sounding space, like the various flowers of a meadow suddenly apparent in the flickering light that carries its fragrances through the trees.

Tobiasson has the most wonderful and chillingly forceful stamina, coming across in the withheld passion of lava under ice; she’s ice-hot.
Before the piece is concluded she reaches a crescendo, in which her voice moves mountains and pleases gods, in overwhelming, brute beauty.
The chamber orchestra is carefully and sparsely instrumentated, utilized with the utmost economy, perfectly balancing and countering Tobiasson’s wonder of a voice.

This short work – just a couple of minutes – in its brevity constitutes a complete work of art that is in need of no other support than its own self-evident sublimity. Marvelous!

The second piece; the second Sonnevi segment (andante monotono), commences in a fast, rhythmic progression of pizzicato strings and, perhaps, woodblocks, in a cumulative emergence from violins to double bass. It’s a swaggering little line of music that finds its way like a little rodent through the underbrush. In a way this beginning has almost a Tchaikovsky ice princess motion, the way it totters along.
Then Ingrid Tobiasson enters:

Her voice is at perfect equilibrium with Kerstin Jeppsson’s instrumentation and composition, and the effect of this truly joint venture of text, voice and musical composition refines the poetic message into something very powerful; an essence of poetic/musical expression.

The percussive elements dot and accentuate the musical line, and even the string instruments are played like percussive instruments. This adds to a frantic and urgent feel in the explanation of emptiness, almost with the persuasion of Tibetan Buddhists explaining the inner nature of everything as… emptiness.
Eventually Ingrid Tobiasson rises up to a complete fulfillment of her own vocal abilities, articulating the words “the impossible” on a voice that is strong as corrugated steel and beautiful as the perfect surfaces of an expertly cut diamond; all in a relentless forward motion of a march-like tune, at the forefront of time, pushing ahead towards a light that blinds like a supernova in the midst of the fleeing NOW.

I feel very strongly this visual aspect of these songs, these poems, in the hands of Kerstin Jeppsson; tilting surfaces that shine and reflect the light of day and the light of mind, in a torrential display of colorful rays, completely clear, completely self-evident, cleansing hearing and thinking and… feeling.
I had no idea that Kerstin Jeppsson would affect me this deeply before I met her with all my defenses down… I’m glad I let myself be vulnerable and accessible before her.

Part 3 (andante risoluto) opens wildly with a carillon-style percussion, madly beaten, with Tobiasson’s voice in exclamative outpours, base drum bouncing and rumbling at the bottom of this haywire Carl Orff incident. The piano trembles and roars in its lowest register while percussion carries the flaming beauty and urgency of the voice ahead, like jubilant masses of people carrying their heroine to be sacrificed or crowned:

The fourth Sonnevi segment (lento dolce) sets out a cappella, after a short moment added-to by strings that sound like a violin/viola duo, until a mid-board piano merges as the alto voice of Ingrid Tobiasson picks up vibrant strength in its casting-out of verses in feverish commitment:

The piano tones feel like splashing chords of water in the sunlight of strings on the coastal rocks of the voice. Tobiasson modulates her vocalisms in dire dynamics, groping way down for resounding clay words of lower chakras, rising through the pitches to Apollonian transparencies in realms of soaring gulls. To travel her voice is to rise in unfathomable outlooks into bottomless voids of space.

Decorative, embellished figurines in the strings stop in motionless curvatures right in front of you, the double bass providing a sense of ground and stability, as a tambourine rattles sharply like a poisonous snake in the leaves.

As Tobiasson’s alto verses continue, they are accompanied by – I believe – the rounded, crusty candy-property sounds of a marimba, and the piano returns as does other chamber ensemble instruments – and the alto reigns in singular beauty for some short moments until the segment dies down into a whimper of the piano and a violin, and continues out into the silence from whence it rose…

A sharp and incisive flute, of an Eastern flavor, opens the fifth and last Göran Sonnevi segment (larghetto con anima), until first the whole ensemble in a thunderous step forth, and then the full force of Tobiasson’s alto, hit hard like a slab of rock falling from the skies.
There is an incredible richness to this last part, in a feeling of brown and varnished hardwood and the smell of roses. There is a reflection of careful up-keep and tender care to the room of this song, sunlight falling in from a big garden.
There is a feeling and sense of reconciliation, coming-to-terms, in this finality – which is the way it should be, what we all would hope for.

In some very tender moments of this segment the music thins out into just a transparent flute and the tickling pluckings of the high pitches of the strings of a violin - and the afterglow of the whole set of songs/segments is that of a slowly cooling summer evening, coming to rest in a light summer’s night of fairies and elves and all kinds of human dreams…

Kerstin Jeppsson’s mighty work Embrio for mezzo soprano and symphony orchestra is the second work presented on this portrait CD, on tracks 6 - 8. It is Jeppsson’s most comprehensive orchestral work to date. She wrote it on commission from the Swedish Radio.

Jeppsson:

Kerstin Jeppsson continues:

In connection with her work Embrio Kerstin Jeppsson brings up Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the existential perspective: “We have to make the decisions we make; we’re not spared the crises which might lead to liberation.”
Jeppsson also injects Hegelian aspects on her work, constructing it in a thesis – anti-thesis – synthesis manner, the three different parts taking on each of those characteristics. The first movement – a violently disjointed piece - is called Change, and, as the booklet text says, deals more with the prospect of change as such than it deals with pregnancy, contrary to the content of the poem.
The second part is Unknowing; a basically peaceful “anti-thesis music”, pondering the uncertainty of change.
The final movement of Embrio is Go Out Into the Woods!. The author of the booklet text regards it as an “awakening from the still meditation of the second movement”, but containing lingering, though transformed, motifs from the first section.
Jeppsson says that she’s had a particular forest in mind, in the Nöthagen area outside her hometown Nyköping:

With an ominous, rumbling percussion, growing into a sudden torrent, the music begins. It halts as fast as it started, pauses in a sense of withheld might, shudders, moves like the sea in the night, breathes faster, a tremendous tension building up in the orchestra, in sudden gasps of havoc and rage, easing out on a soothing marimba, the music turning and twisting in worry and weariness, uneasy, nervous…

The double basses gather strength and speed, rush forth into an explosion of metallic percussion, gathering the whole orchestra in tremendous Shostakovich exclamations of 7th Symphony characteristics – and then a voice in the storm, on top of her lungs, struggling to be heard in the torrent; the mezzo soprano Katarina Dalayman:

The combined expression of the orchestra and the voice is startling, delivered in brilliant, clear-cut orchestration of the utmost diligence and sensitivity, never lacking force and intensity; not even through the calmer sections, in which the inertia of the force is felt in the slightest change of timbre, in the most minuscule deceleration or acceleration of tempi, in the smallest hint at crescendo or diminuendo; the minute variation carrying all the power and might gathered in the preceding bars of thunderclap fury – all reflecting the emotional state inside a person subject to change…

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is one of the foremost symphony orchestras of the world, and their skills are amply put to test in as complex a work as Kerstin Jeppsson’s Embrio. I can feel that the members enjoy a mighty task like this, and of course, they pass the test with flying colors – the recording being flawless, top notch, high-end! It must be wonderful and exciting for a composer to have her labor of love so well taken care of.

Ah, the voice of Katarina Dalayman flies and flutters like a butterfly in stark sunlight over Bronze Age grave mounds; an elastic progression of translucent gestures against the light; transparent as the silk of the 18th century, strong as the Arabs’ love for Om Kalsoum – decorative like the patterns of the embroidery of the peasantry of Dalecarlia…

The rage and anxiety of the score is at times relieved by moments of reflection, rest and meditative introspection, in a manner that associates to soloist cadenzas.

A trumpet goes off on private excursions, gleaming in the meadow, like a little child leaving the picnicking family for his own toddler explorations of life, completely focused on the now and the here, like only a child or an artist can be, hypnotically resting in the moment and the observed, oblivious of self.

However, the wind picks up out of open bays, and the emotional storm gathers thunderous clouds once again, as the woods of strings sway and wheeze in the orchestra.

With four and a half minutes to go of the first movement of Embrio, Katarina Dalayman recurs with her dark timbres rising up the branches of the trees to the top layer of the forest, signaling to the storm clouds in invoking shrieks and elaborate vocal gestures.

The orchestral motion slows into a somber mood as the final lines of the first part of the text describe the lingering summer, and in the beauty of the text the voice looses itself in the beauty of its own timbres and the lyric sweeps of the slowly dissolving orchestra…

The wordless singing of the beginning of the second movement displays a tormenting beauty of vocal timbres, dark and strong and melancholy like stretches of darkness over seascape horizons in humid conditions…

A timpani merges with the wordlessness, strings appear, and Katarina Dalayman moans in a mimicry of a creature under the moon, from inside her uncertainty in this movement called Unknowing. There is an old flavor to this extended, outstretched singing, this dark female tone over the land, reminding me of Yma Sumac and to an extent also of Bidú Sayão.

This dark, worried voice ponders the fetus inside her, this carrier of genes from generation to generation, and she knows this fetus is a child, a man, a grand father and someone who people in the far future will remember as one of their forefathers…

The music moves graciously through the orchestra in dark rhythms and strings’ silver, in this ambiguous, misty atmosphere of the woman who is bearing.

The tones curve in on themselves, a little bell rings, the double basses slowly fall silent – and the woman raises a storm through her voice, bringing the formerly so silent orchestra into a swaying march… until, again, stillness pours like honey and archipelago sunlight… and finally the woman reaches some kind of resignation… or is it reconciliation, a hope, a glimpse of something:

The last part of Embrio cuts right through the haze, into open light, in a commanding tone of voice:

The voice of Katarina Dalayman is magnificently strong and viable against the thunderous orchestra, choppy like the North Sea, and in long, sweeping motions her voice collects the entire audiosphere, harnessing the orchestra like a rodeo artist would a wild stallion!

With about three minutes to go the horns of the orchestra sound like fog horns out at sea, auditory beacons for the sea-farers, and Dalayman makes a mermaid impression on me; perhaps even portraying the dangerous sirens that lure the sailors into danger and devastation through the irresistible charm of their voices…

As Dalayman slows her expression and comes to a halt, piercing piccolos have me vision a Greek boy-good in golden locks on the shore of the Mediterranean, rippling laughter of innocence rising through the deep blue sky…

With about one minute left of Embrio, Kerstin Jeppsson starts to sound like Allan Pettersson, with screaming brass and the snare drum, and that certain desperation that we learned to appreciate through the Seventh Symphony, especially.

The conclusion of Embrio is an ending in style; a tour-de-force of voice and orchestra in a blasting, joint effort that… blows you away!

Embrio is without doubt one of the most impressive orchestral pieces with voice that I’ve ever come across – yes; I don’t hesitate to state that it indeed is one of the most impressive musical works that I’ve heard, period! It really shook the ground under me.

A late piece of Jeppsson’s is her String Quartet 2, from 1999 – 2000, performed by the celebrated Tale Quartet. It’s placed at tracks 9 – 11 on the CD.
Jeppsson sketched the quartet in Stockholm at the close of 1999, but the lion part of the composition was executed on the Swedish West Coast, in the northern part of the District of Bohuslän in the summer of 2000. Jeppsson explains:

This string quartet is written in three sections. One might say that the cello owns part 1, the viola part 2 and finally the violins part 3.

It begins Shostakovich-like, the voices of the instruments talking in each other’s mouths, the instruments getting a little in the way of each other, like were they all flocking to look out the same window, or rush out the same door, or perhaps into the same subway car…

An immediate pause is tightly followed by a statement, in turn bearing a pause, in turn displaying another statement – and this keeps up for a certain amount of time, Shostakovich lingering in the wings, his associate and friend Weinberg walking backstage…

Out of this milieu steps Kerstin Jeppsson, fully fledged as a string quartet composer. Perhaps it is in this smaller format that the true face of a composer is revealed, because it is always harder to handle more meager means. The composition as such cannot be hidden at all inside clouds of sound or marvelous effects; the skeleton of compositional thought is plainly perceivable – and Jeppsson creates wonders in this noble art of the string quartet, too, like she did in previous masterworks on this overwhelming CD, overwhelming for me, a Swedish connoisseur of art music who has just discovered - very late! – a genial composer from his own rural hometown! I could almost cry!

The first movement, the cello’s movement – has a bewildered, confused beginning – or maybe just careful, stepping forth, stopping, looking around, looking ahead, looking back – continuing… and the cello gives some stamina and forceful words to lead the pack, even though it’s a hesitating bunch, three hesitant smaller ones and one bigger who takes the lead, dark voice up front, the viola huddling ahead downwind with the two violins in shadow-play behind it, a lost crew of Godot expectants.

The melody in the cello is talkative, explanatory, uttering some basic harsh words which then swing into sad notes and remorse and moments of remembrances and bitter anguish, but twisting and turning out of the grip of its own downtrodden feelings, upward, ahead, in a flight for fresh air and horizons!

The second movement stoops sadly at the outset, the viola lamenting, striding under the weight of its dark, somber feelings, breathing slowly, its metabolism in a slow-motion metamorphosis; big volumes of silence allowed to seep in and fill up the emptiness of grief.

After a while this inward sadness takes on almost a universal hue of the grief of one and all, of this existence that Tibetan Buddhists describe as an ocean of pain, in which we all want to reach happiness, never found where we’re looking – but most the time lingering somewhere much closer, so close we can’t see it…

This second movement drifts by like a calm breath that hardly stirs, an air of purple fragrances from out in the dark, carrying the scent of butterfly orchis; Platanthéra bifólia… and cows are resting over in the grass like ancient memories in the night…

The third movement isn’t that jolly either, but it has reached some kind of lighter level of consciousness, nonetheless. The violins fly up and flutter around in a rural dance on wooden floors in a barn – and light is seeping in through the cracks in the wall. Dusty tools line the walls and litter the corners and you can hear the calls of loons from out on the lake…
I get this pastoral feeling in here in the third movement, and a conclusion of matters, a matter-of-factly acceptance of the circumstances that cannot be changed, the fate that is ours as beings trapped in these bodies for as long as this life will last us, and then… bardo journey and rebirth into another body-vehicle, perhaps… and The Tale Quartet brings this complete music to its close – but the beauty of Jeppsson’s writing has me start the quartet again from the beginning, for a laid-back listening without writing, for a moment of feeling without thinking, because Kerstin Jeppsson is worth such an attention, a vulnerable, naked listening; I owe her that much!

Women’s Songs is the title of tracks 12 – 14, sung by soprano Lena Hoel and played on the piano by Bengt Forsberg. The songs/poems are written by Edith Södergran (The Rose and Discovery) and Elsa Grave (Love Poem).

Kerstin Jeppsson composed these pieces early on, in 1973, when she was a pupil of Maurice Karkoff. She says:

I can’t refrain from quoting a part of a poem by myself in this context. The poem is called Raga Darbari, and was originally written for a raga sung by Pandit Pran Nath, but here I chose just a few lines from the text:

Edith Södergran’s The Rose from the collection The Land That Is Not begins:

The poem – like often with Södergran (who died early from illness and didn’t experience so much of life, really) – is openly erotic.

The composition is also very romantic in a traditional style, perhaps under the influence of Maurice Karkoff, who himself was a prolific composer of songs.

Discovery, the second Södergran poem, from the collection September Lyre, objects to eroticism and its fulfillment… or does it?:

This is Lieder tradition, for sure – beginning in grand emotions, but immediately landing on a more sober note, again to rise through intensity, then falling back in some kind of surrender – a motion through the emotions like waves of water a moonlit night; yes, it is that romantic, like a 19th century painting in a sturdy dark frame!

Elsa Grave’s Love Poem is quite a blunt but passably metaphoric description of sexual intercourse between man and woman, from the woman’s point of view; dew cup and dewdrops and all… and why not!
I can almost see the wringing femininity under the rhythmic movement of the masculinity in these tones, in this excited female voice and this sometimes persuasive and target-oriented piano – but maybe I’m making it too easy on myself; I’m sure you can hear this miniature in a number of ways.

Tracks 15 – 17 are collectively titled The Dark Angels, with three poems by Karin Boye. The work has the subtitle Three Motets, indicating a spiritual setting, primarily.
The individual poems/songs are called To You, You Are My Purest Comfort and The Dark Angels. The songs are performed by the Gustaf Sjökvist Chamber Choir.

Kerstin Jeppsson comments:

She continues:

To You has a mighty phrasing:

The initial word, the personal pronoun you, is lingered on, pondered, in different layers of the choir, repeated in a light-show of sound! This enhances the basic importance of the I and the Thou, to quote Martin Buber.
The You word is chanted like a mantra or an incantation, and who hasn’t been in this hopeless and basically dangerous position of being completely vulnerable to someone, completely dependant on somebody else, another human being – if this indeed isn’t an invocation directed at God, in which case the interpretation is a different one, of course.

The Gustaf Sjökvist Chamber Choir is a mixed choir, of course, and Jeppsson distributes the dark and the light, the male and the female, beautifully, strata per strata, in angelic rays of light through towering clouds; a Gustave Doré illustration… a score of layered light…

You Are My Comfort Most Pure comes across like a traditional motet, indeed, in sound and guise – but the message is that of pleasure in pain, drastically; a masochist expression of a tormented soul… and Karin Boye committed suicide, perhaps because of her swaying sense of gender; not an easy predicament in her days.
This inherent message is contrasted to the confidence and hope that you are used to applying to a motet so beautifully sung, like light of the spirit shining through every farthest corner of human life… and I am reminded of all these teenage girls that cut themselves just to mask their emotional pain with a stronger physical one…

The Dark Angels is the final Jeppsson work on this CD – and maybe I have to ask myself why she decided to end the collection this way – or maybe I should call her up and ask her. I’m sure she doesn’t do anything for nothing, anyway – there is a deeper reason.

There is an ambiguity in this poem too, and – if it had been of a later date – a psychedelic atmosphere around it:

In a slow, irresistible swell of the ocean of voices in the dark I sense the mystery at the heart of existence, the pure waves at the heart of sound, the flaming longing in the heart of man under the stars… and Kerstin Jeppsson has conveyed deep thoughts and feelings to my heart from hers, through the humble grandeur of her act of composition.