The short biography

Patrik Karlsson has toured all over Europe, India & USA. He is the founder of Uruppförandeklubben, played and participated in several radio and TV-shows, held master classes and seminaries at educational institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music, Scengymnasiet and Kulturama in Stockholm and Temple University & West Chester University in USA.

Patrik is a strong proponent for contemporary music and has premiered over 80 chamber works. In Norway he has toured with Ålesund String Quartet, the actress Karoline Isaksen and the country singer Synnøve Aanensen. He has also performed as a soloist with Ålesund Symphony Orchestra and Bergslagen Chamber Orchestra.

As a free form musician Patrik has worked with Lindha Kallerdahl and Tony Blomdahl.

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PRESS VOICES

from Uppsala Nya Tidning
" ...technical perfection and moving"
"Beautiful playing, good spirit and a very nice connection
with the audience"
"The interpretation was magnificent and the performance
kept the audience captive until the brutal ending.

from Sundsvalls Tidning
"Katarina Widell and Patrik Karlsson were very interesting and professionel aquaintances and their skill and boldness showed new ways of use for their baroque instruments"

from Fagersta-Posten
Patrik Karlsson´s soft guitar playing is always a delight to
listen to.

from Nutida Musik/Tritonus
Kraftfullt och inspirerat av Patrik Karlsson och Putte Frich Meier.

from Gitarr och Luta
Som avslutning framfördes Patrik Karlssons Homenaje a Christopher Anthin för gitarr och ljudspår. Detta är ett substantiellt verk med allt från avantgardistiska inslag i inledningen via transformeringen till popmusik.

from Västmanlands Läns Tidning
Elden sitter i fingararna hos Patrik Karlsson och Anne-Mette
Skovbjerg och de behandlar sina instrument som rivjärn.

from Helsingborgs Dagblad
en gitarrvirtuos på mammas gata.

from Philadelphia City Paper
You never know exactly what to expect with Duo con Forza. If you go to the concert and feel the need to emote enthusiasm, just remember; rhythmic clapping is perfectly okay, but the Fire Department prohibits the use of cigarette lighters in the Ethical Society.

from Philadelphia music project
The audience fell in love with them. They wouldn’t let them (Duo con Forza) go back stage during intermission and stayed after the concert and chatted some more.

from Vestmanlands läns tidning
Kraftfulla utbrott av energi, korta och väl utplacerade - två blixtrande soloframträdanden.

from Bogense Tidende
Duo con Forza spiller med en sjælden kraft og energi, og så smukt at englene synger

The story version

I’ve always been very lucky, I have great friends and I’ve had perfect teachers.

It all started when I was ten and met the guitar teacher Ulf Pettersson.,He’s a gentile person and was the reason why I kept on playing through the difficult period of being a teenager. Ulf gave me my first tape of mixed guitar music I still have it laying around.,At the same time my best friend, Mats Nilsson, taught me the value of hard work and discipline. He throws the javelin and we used to stay out, sometimes at night, practicing throwing, strength, speed, you name it. It didn’t matter if it rained or snowed.,I lost a lot of weight in the process which was good since I was a rather fat little teenager. Later on Mats won the national championship in the USA.

When I reached sixteen Ulf approached me and said – you’ve been studying to long under my guidance you should change teacher. He recommended Bengt Wikström, Ulf’s former teacher. The lessons with Bengt was a totally different experience, he’s a very confident and outgoing man. The first lesson went well, he asked me -Do you like to go out and party every night? I said no. -Can you stand being alone for hours? I said yes. -Do you have a girlfriend? I said no. Good, he said, I´ll teach you the guitar. I said thank you. Now I understand why Bengt asked me all these strange questions, he’s totally devoted to his students and I used up a fairly amount of his spare time sitting and talking to him after each lesson for hours. He gave me all kind of different books to read and showed me videos of masters from the past. To this day I always feel welcome to his house by both him and his wonderful wife Ulla, whom by the way is a wonderful cook. After three-four years of intensive studies Bengt sent me to visit Gunnar Lif his former teacher for some lessons. Once again my life turned over.

Gunnar has a way with people that’s remarkable and he showed me the way to combine what I`d learned from Mats in sports and the things I learned from Ulf and Bengt in music and boosted my practicing to a different level. I’m still working with the things I’ve learned from Gunnar and so is he, so I suppose I´ll be a student for all eternity. The most important thing I can mention about Gunnar and the most inspiring is his endless curiosity and his way of wanting to learn everything and not to simplify the problems but to solve them. Like he once said –Great another thing I don’t know! and then he just goes to work and learn it.

The EN.D.E biography

EN.D.E, Katarina Widell, recorders and Patrik Karlsson, archlute, electric and classical guitar, is an innovative and multi faceted ensemble. Although recently created, at the end of 2008, they have had time to discover and premier music from the 18th century, record with the metal band Vindictiv (featuring former Yngwie Malmsteen singers Göran Edman and Marc Boals on vocals), commission and premiering works for archlute, recorder, electric and classical guitar and electronics from composers from Italy, USA and Sweden.

EN.D.E has performed at such diverse festivals as Stockholm Early Music Festival, Geiger festival of Contemporary and Electronic Music in Gothenburg and Örebro Contemporary Chamber Music Festival. They have also performed within the worldwide concert series Café de Concert as well as regular concerts within Scandinavia.

Two of EN.D.E's greater projects have during 2009 received funding from RANK (The society for organizers of contemporary music), The Swedish council of Cultural Affairs and many other private, government and municipal grants.

During 2010 EN.D.E will amongst other things perform in the USA, work on the YouHero project, collaborate with Italian composer Maurizio Pisati and launch the project Italian Elegance and Swedish Determination.

Duo con Forza – The beginning

My friend Patrik Marchente, master of poly-rhythms, and I decided to go to Denmark for some studies at one of their conservatories. We felt we needed a break from the Swedish teaching system. There I met the guitarist Anne-Mette Skovbjerg. The conservatory arranged all kinds of projects and in the guitar department they frequently used both Anne-Mette and myself, some times in the same project. We very soon realized how easy it was playing together and started to make plans for a collaboration. The first thing we did was not to plan and practise a programme but to go to a photographer and a print house and have them make us a brochure. Soon we got our first concert and we practiced like mad to learn a concert program. The concert went rather good so we decided to continue playing together.

Two weeks before another concert at a conservatory I got really sick. The doctors medicine didn't do any good and we were about to cancel the concert. But a day before the concert I could actually sit up and since we were going to play with the mezzo-soprano Christina Dahl-Christensen for the first time I decided to give it a try. The concert went well mostly because of the adrenaline which woke up my body. We all took a bow and went off stage were I fell down on the floor and fainted. When I woke up Anne-Mette and Christina were happy, but they didn't really pay the attention to me that I thought I deserved. The reason was an invitation to play at a chamber music festival in Poznan, Poland. So it was worth the pain.

The first time I really realized what being an musician is all about was when Duo con Forza in a very short time had concerts in three different countries. First we played in the concert hall in Odense (Denmark). There were about nine hundred in the audience. We met the mayor and got invited to nice restaurants. Then we flew to Spain playing and learning flamenco. At one of the concerts we played along with some really good flamenco guitarists, singers, and dancers from all of parts of Europe. The flamenco musicians seemed a bit tensed about something but we just played our pieces like we'd done before. As we were leaving the stage a man from the audience approached us and asked us, in Spanish, to play one more piece. Later on in the evening someone gave that same man a guitar and he played for us and then we realized that he was a remarkable player. It was Tomatito.

After one glorious week in Spain we got up at four o'clock in the morning to catch a flight to Sweden. We were going to play in Norrköping concert hall in the evening. We were of course really tired after the flight but after a quick shower and some food we were ready. It actually went really well and there were a very large audience. We stayed at the best hotel in Norrköping for about five days and everybody treated us very nice took us to dinner and showed us the city. After these fantastic experiences we only had one concert left. We were going to play a charity concert for some disabled persons in Denmark. So we got on the plane and flew to Denmark. When we arrived and unpacked our things we started playing, one of the residents started booing. He had been forced to attend the concert, he'd much rather watch television. They had to carry him to his room we could hear him boo all the way. One minute your in heaven and the next your back on earth.

DcF in the USA

Our first little tour in USA (2004 )was a great experience. My dear friends David Laganella and Richard Belcastro had just started out doing concerts with their organisation Chamber Music Now!. And invited us over to play in New York and Philadelphia and doing some master classes at some schools. The plan was to commission pieces from American and Swedish composers. We performed pieces by Tony Blomdahl, Martin Q Larsson, Anna Eriksson and Jonas Asplund from Sweden and from the US Drew Hemenger, Richard Belcastro and Allen Krantz.

Since Anne-Mette lived in Denmark and I in Sweden we met up about a week before going to US and practiced like mad, recording each rehearsal and being ruthless in our critique. We rented a car and drove off to the hotel near the airport, it was a cosy bed and breakfast out on the country side, a great start on the journey. The trip over went well, and we had no problems getting the guitars on the plane. Not like that time when security guards pulled Anne-Mette off the plane and made her stay on the ground for being aggressively protective of her guitar.

When we arrived, jet-lagged of course, we stayed up for as long as we could and enjoying the company off David Lagenella and his wife Hilary. Everything went smooth during the week of preparation in Philadelphia, we met David´s parents and family and ate doughnuts, chicken wings, drinking nice domestic beer and practicing. It was great. Then came the day to perform. We rented a car and drove to New York, where we stayed with Drew Hemenger and his kamikaze cats. We where lots of people in his flat, the composer Jonas Asplund from Sweden, Richard Belcastro, Anne-Mette and myself. During all night the cats crawled up on a cupboard and jumped down on poor Jonas whom was lying on the floor, he did not get much sleep.

Well, I was rested and fit for the next day when we went to the concert hall near Broadway. I was driving the car and Richard kept making fun off me for not honking like I ought to. I was just doing small quite honks, not like the Americans, well they are usually louder than most people anyway. While sitting in the car in an endless line of cars waiting patiently for them to move a meter at a time a car right in front off us suddenly caught fire. A big black cloud of smoke was gushing from the bottom of the vehicle. I pointed at the smoke and said. - Shit! Look at that. Richard noticed the smoke and in a calm voice replied. - Ahh, right. Those models has a tendency to catch fire, don´t worry it won´t explode. I still can´t to this day understand what the owner of a car that “has a tendency to catch fire” is thinking when he buys his car of fire. - Oh what a bargain, only 12000 dollars, I´ll get a car and some excitement. The people who buy these cars are probably going bungy jumping. - Oh look! The rope is starting to look worn out. We´ll some one has to be the last one using it, might as well be me.

The concert went pretty well, and the audience liked it. We mixed the contemporary with some Lawes, de Falla and other nice stuff. We rounded it off with the Sonata by Christopher Anthin, the one where we play with food on our guitars.

We went back to Philadelphia the same day after some food and hanging out with some people from the audience, it must have been five in the morning when we finally put our lovely heads down and fell a sleep.

We got up and started to prepare for the next concert, which went well. The audience enjoyed our little jokes and our cute accents. Then came the mother off all parties... We barely didn´t make it home that night but somehow we managed to find a Taxi and made it to bed just before dawn, or was it after day break, I can´t remember.