JOHANNES JANSSON’s background and development are quite unique. Born in 1950 in Stockholm and raised in an artistic home, he began his career as a guitarist and improviser. He studied musicology in Lund, double bass and music theory at the Malmö Academy of Music and took private lessons in composition with Sten Broman and, later, Ingvar Lidholm. His first orchestral piece was performed in 1970 and in 1971 he took his debut on the podium conducting his own orchestral works. Between the years of 1972 and 1974 he lived in southern India, and has since returned on a number of occasions and been profoundly inspired by the music of Indian composer Sunil Bhattacharya and Mirra Alfassa's organ music. Much of Jansson’s music is heavily coloured by Indian themes and moods, in the sense of its spiritual community and striving for sincerity in artistic space, rather than in purely musical terms.

The pronouncement about writing music “so disarmingly beautiful” was no doubt nothing short of provocative back in the early 1970s in circles of a more "modernist" persuasion. Although his early 1970s works indeed might have an avant-guardish feel, since then Jansson has gone his own way, his travels to India in particular having given him a kind of mental distance to European culture and art music. Amongst his chamber works, the 40-minute long "String Quartet No. 2" (1976) represents a major step in the process of liberation from modernist ideals; although arguably more important in this respect is the richly iridescent "The Mutation of Death" for vocalising soprano and orchestra (1985).

Johannes Jansson has an extensive back catalogue incorporating most genres. At the same time, however, one can note a distinct focus: he seldom writes openly affective music and is no expressionist, holding as he does a firm hand on the reins of restraint while concentrating the music around shifting nuances of colour and light. The character of the music is on the whole mild but never submissive.

Jansson composes with a strong sensibility, and his profoundly expressive string quartets testify to how well he has managed to formulate a personal idiom within classical parameters. This sensibility also reappears in larger and more consummate contexts, such as the piano concerto "Corpo in luce" (1987) and the "Guitar Concerto"(1996). Mention should also be made of the titanic "Hymn to the mystic fire" (2004), which, with its enormous breadth of expression becomes something of a compilation of Jansson’s many and varied artistic facets; tenderly lyrical qualities, at times couched in tranquil Oriental musical language, also tend here towards a raw expressiveness in rarely dramatic, almost violent orchestral crescendi.

Johannes Jansson’s production is rich and in many respects strangely neglected.

Tony Lundman, rev. 2006
English translation: Neil Betterigde
Photo: Lars Torndahl