Gageego! was founded in 1995 and specialises in exploring and making contemporary music more accessible. As one of the most important new forces in Music Sweden, the ensemble is appreciated for interpreting today’s music at the highest technical and artistic level in a fun and curious way.

The group regularly collaborates with Swedish and international guests such as Peter Eötvös, Heinz Karl Gruber and Pierre-André Valade.

In addition to concerts in Sweden, the ensemble has toured in Russia, Denmark and China and guest performed at Lange Nacht der Neue Klänge in Vienna’s concert hall.

For a number of years, the ensemble has had its own concert series in the Gothenburg Concert Hall.

And in the same way as Gageego! was born out of a number of musicians’ need to play chamber music at a high level, the group is today driven by new challenges, both artistic and technical, in both modern classics and the completely newly written. The success and the response from the audience spurs the ensemble to further desire to discover and renew.

Anders Jonhäll, flute
Martin Ödlund, percussion
Johan Stern, cello

About the concert 

To ‘produce articulate, beautiful and abstract sounds from secret whispers’, is not only the starting point for Kaijja Saariaho’s Laconsime de l’aile but is a consistent theme in today’s concert with Gageego! In both of Saariaho’s works – separated by 15 years – what was an ambition in the early 80s became the very basis, for her, for composing in the late 90s. In Barrett’s Inward, which is essentially one of the parts of the utopian full-length work ‘The opening of the mouth’, we encounter a similar movement but in the opposite direction; the abstract sounds (not least through the complex sheet music image, come and look at our sheet music after the concert!) seek the hidden. The opening of the mouth takes its title from an ancient Egyptian death ritual. In Emil Nilsson’s first performance, we once again meet the intersection between the secret, the beautiful and the abstract forms, as Nilsson himself writes about his new work: “[the trio is] a continued exploration of the poetic potential of sound.”

Program

Kaija Saariaho – Laconisme de l’aile [1982] – for solo flute

Simon Steen-Andersen – Beside Besides [2003] – for percussion and cello

Wolfgang Rihm – Deploration [1973] – for flute, cello and percussion

Richard Barrett – Inward [1994-95] – for flute and percussion

Kaiija Saariaho – Spins and Spells [1997] – for solo cello

Emil Nilsson – transparent structure [2023], uruppförande – for alto flute, cello and percussion