Right from the beginning, composer Christian Lindberg decided to involve clarinettist Emil Jonason at all stages in the process of writing his clarinet concerto The Erratic Dreams of Mr. Grönstedt (2011-2013): from those initial embryos which were to become the main motifs of the work to the finer details of the two cadenzas which were the last parts to be written. The title of the work seems to have been influenced, if we are to believe Lindberg, by the Swedish cognac brand Grönstedts Cognac as well as by the personality of Emil Jonason. In these erratic dreams, a rather ordinary male character appears to be getting ready for a Spring Ball, or encountering some character named Lisa with her magic cape. Like the surrealistic dreams, the music itself doesn’t have any kind of plot to it but is a perfectly ordinary concerto (albeit in five movements), and neither do the titles of the individual movements claim to follow any logic or descriptive nature. As regards the other work on this album, Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind for clarinet and string quartet (1994), the composer claims “to have attempted here to integrate two strong musical traditions into a single work. Therefore you’ll see that the notation for the Klezmer clarinet(s) differs from that for the quartet, the latter being quite detailed, the former not. I assume that clarinettists approaching this work will familiarize themselves with the style of Klezmer music and will listen to and study the records made by the old masters (first decades of the 20th century). This is essential, in order for this work to make artistic sense... The goal is not to imitate, but to learn from them new ways of performing a line. Doing this, I feel, will ultimately widen the horizons of Western classical music”. And who, might the reader enquire, is Isaac the Blind? Well, he was kabbalist rabbi living in 13th Century Provence, and who dictated a manuscript in which he asserted that all things and events in the universe are product of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet’s letters. © SM/Qobuz