A Choral Midsummer Light's Dream, a true story

It is 41F (5°C), poring down outside and I am tired, overwhelmed, grateful and very happy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has been the coldest Midsummers since the measurements started, but the passion and joy from 800 choral singers invading Umeå during the Midsummer week has made the week one of the warmest ever.

During the years working on making A Choral Midsummer Light’s Dream - Umeå International Festival come true, I had pictured myself running around town being a part of concerts, workshops, impromptu musical meetings and late night hang outs. Even this last bedridden winter I saw myself being on my feet in time for the festival, anything else would just be too damned sad.

Well. My condition is not as bad as it was this winter and spring. I am a bit better. But just a bit. Running around town is not happening. And the festival week was coming up, me still spending most of my part on my couch. It sucked.

There were five slots in the festival schedule though marked red in my calendar. Which I hoped and wished for. Every member of Sångkraft Chamber Choir (Kammarkören Sångkraft) who has been arranging the festival and which I am a member of, had different assignments for the week. My job was to MC the White Night Concerts together with my alto colleague and friend Agneta and my sister Kia who used to be a Sångkraft soprano. And then there was the Sångkraft main concert  which I so badly desired to sing. And the final concert, the closing of the festival: the Grand  Premiere Concert which I would both MC and sing.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were filled with Bright Light Concerts and On Site Concerts, and in the evening we wrapped the day up with a late concert, the White Night Concerts, featuring excellent vocal ensembles from different European countries. This would be the peak performance of the day. And it was. Even so for me. From my couch I would rise, put something nice on and enter the spotlight on high heels. 

Agneta and Kia are teaching foreign languages as their profession. Our idea was to present the concerts in four languages: Swedish, English, German and French. To make every nationality feel welcome and respected. We didn’t cover Latvian, Estonian and Icelandic unfortunately, but maybe it was a good thing, the concerts would have been way too long if so.

Our intention was to create a warm and welcoming feeling, to be informative and professional and to look good. Yes, you heard me right. This was an opportunity to dive into our closets, spread everything out on my bed, look for different themes, try on, match with shoes and… have fun. Boy, were we having fun! 

Tuesday morning I woke up with a very specific and scary pain in my lower back. Shit! Why? Always that big WHY? Why can’t I just be allowed to do what I have planned to do and enjoy it??? Just for once!

I have a choice. To give in and stay on my couch or to mobilize myself and everyone I can think of to help me live my life, the best way possible.

Audrey was my dresser, putting on the different outfits and jewelry for each day. Kia, Agneta and members of Sångkraft have been helping me up from and down on the folded bed I have been lying on back stage inbetween our appearances in the spotlight. And without Mimmi there is no way I could have been a part of the festival at all. 

Mimmi is a friend from my teens who has come back into my life recently. Mimmi and her cool and wonderful 16-year old daughter has picked me up every day, been at my side during the events, dropped me off in the late white night, undressed the outfit for the evening and tucked me in on my couch. They have been dragging my folded bed and loads of pillows and bags with necessities back and forth from here at the end of the road and the back stages of downtown Umeå. They have taken care of all the logistics and given me the chance to focus on my MC scripts and making a good looking entrance on stage. I don’t have words for what Mimmi and her daughter has done for me this week.

Three nights. Three concerts. The first one in off white tones, the second colorful solids, and the last one midsummer flowers on white. Yes, we did look good. And we acted professional. And we had fun. Most of all we had so much fun!

The Sångkraft main concert was the toughest one for me. Standing singing was extremely hard. In bed later I really didn’t think I could do the grand finale yesterday. But I did. A final MC and the premiere of Lux Arctica, a piece composed on commission for the festival and performed by 200 choral singers. And the fact that I could even hang out at the festival hotel bar with euphoric choral singers from all over Europe a couple of late nights makes me feel like I really was a part of the festival after all.

Now, this was my introspective story about A Choral Midsummer Light’s Dream - Umeå International Choir Festival. There is a different one, the one with the birds eye-view. The one telling about 800 singers, 34 choirs from 10 different countries making Umeå sing for five 24-7 days. The one about a dream coming remarkably true and fulfilled in most every detail. The one about Sångkraft, this afternoon sharing laughs and tears of joy and gratefulness over what we achieved and experienced together this Midsummer week. The story about making choir history, for ourselves, for Umeå, and for our guests from other parts of Sweden. And France, Germany, Lativa, Estonia, Belarus, Iceland England, U.S and Canada. The story about A Choral Midsummer Light’s Dream. 

A Choral Dream about to come true

It’s happening! It’s unreal, but it’s happening!

I am a choral singer, I’ve been singing in choirs most my life, and the greater deal in Kammarkören Sångkraft, Sångkraft Chamber Choir. In the late eighties me and my friend Pälle, a tenor in Sångkraft, started planning on an international choir festival in Umeå. Umeå is a festival city. At that time the Jazz Festival, the Chamber Music Festival and the Folk Festival. Our idea was that Umeå was lacking a choir festival.

We also had a very clear idea of what kind of festival we wanted to create. Our experience from visiting festivals in Europe was that the bigger ones with a lot of choirs spread out over a large area wasn’t as fun as the tighter ones where you constantly ran in to each other. We wanted a warm and welcoming festival offering high quality choral music.

1989 Pälle and I walked in to the City Cultural Department with a hand written document in a bender. The head of the Umeå Festivals listened to us for a good while, really liked the idea and said Go! Only, he didn’t give us any money. I still remember the weird and uncomfortable feeling standing on the winter side walk afterwards. Kind of loved and rejected at the same time. There was no way Sångkraft could make the festival happen on a volunteer basis, and the plans for an international choir festival in Umeå was filed in the far back of my private book shelf.

Time passed, I took a 16 year sabbatical from singing and on my return 2009 a couple of people were toying the idea of a festival again. More festivals around Europe had been visited over the years and the impression was the same as during the eighties: if you don’t get to share and connect you are loosing the very idea of a festival. Once again we knew what we wanted to do and create.

Umeå is still and even more so a festival city, extended with several pop and rock festivals and MADE, the international, eclectic festival for performing arts at NorrlandsOperan, the Umeå opera house. But the timing was different than in the late eighties: Umeå was elected the European Capital of Culture 2014!

At the time a group of 6-7 people in Sångkraft started fantasizing about an international choir festival, the year for the Capital of Culture was pretty much empty. Umeå had won the title but didn't have much to fill the title with. After pitching the idea to the choir, them buying it, we were quite fast on formulating a concept, making a preliminary budget and presenting it to the City. 

While other cultural players in Umeå have been fighting hard with very little result in the Capital of Culture process, the Sångkraft Chamber Choir choir festival concept and budget was approved at an early stage. The fantasy was suddenly real and the choir was facing something we had no practical experience from. Enchantment was mixed with fear as we were up to the evidence, high expectations from the Capital of Culture has been a pretty heavy load on our inexperienced shoulders.  

So, the concept was a given. And the time of the year for the festival too. We wanted to attract singers from the world with the most exotic feature of northern Sweden: the Midsummer light!

During a dinner at a summer glass porch we came up with the given name: A Choral Midsummer Light’s Dream. Added with the subheading Umeå International Choir Festival. Perfect, it was perfect! Trouble 1, actually, is the artist behind the logotype, and we created a visual identity transferring the early summer shimmering greenery and light in our minds, into a picture.

Hundreds, thousands of work hours later, Sångkraft Chamber Choir is now at the home stretch fore the start of the historic first international choir festival in Umeå. On Monday the first choirs will be arriving and on Tuesday A Choral Midsummer Light’s Dream will be inaugurated, continuing until Saturday. 34 vocal ensembles from 8 countries, altogether about 800 singers, will make Umeå sing 24-7 for the next week!

Every Sångkraft member will have a special assignment: hosts for visiting choirs, office duty, coordinating the parade for the inauguration, work shop hosts, MC-ing concerts, drive the bus to the airport, selling tickets, picking the flowers for the May pole, bus hosts, at the door concert service a s o, a s o, a s o… 

Malls, out door stages, churches and concert halls will be the scene for the vision a group of just a few imagined five years ago. Even what Pälle and I were planning 25 years ago! Connecting and sharing in music and in person. Finishing the festival with a traditional Midsummers celebration on Midsummer’s Eve, and a grand finale on Midsummer’s Day premiering Lux Arcticas, a piece composed on commission for A Choral Midsummer Light’s Dream, performed by hundreds of singers.

Are we excited? Yes we are! Are we scared? Not any more. Can we do this, yes we can, let’s go!!!