Working with Fröst
Stefan Forsberg’s view
As artistic director of the Konserthuset, I tend to spend 80 or 90 per cent of my time asking questions, but, very occasionally, you encounter an artist whose vision doesn’t need it. When Martin came with the idea for Dollhouse, I told him he could do whatever he liked. When explaining it to the programming coordinator, I confessed I couldn’t say in detail what the project was, or why exactly we were doing it. If it isn’t right, I said, we can talk about it afterwards. That was never necessary. All four of Martin’s collaborations with the orchestra have been a great success.
To reach different audiences, we have to think about familiar music in new ways, or look further afield. The important thing is to be honest about what you’re doing. When we started to perform music from video games, it was suggested we should include bits of Mozart, but I decided to give the audience the music they had come to enjoy. Afterwards, I went up on stage and invited them to come back and listen to something else. We were inundated with emails from people asking for us to recommend concerts from that season’s schedule. That was the best part – we knew it had worked.