CHAPTER I
I was born in the summer of 1968 as the fourth child in a family with three sisters (later, another sister and a little brother would be added to the sibling team).
When I was a toddler I desperately tried to reach the keys of the piano in our house and sat under the piano, hypnotized by my mother’s playing, and crying when she stopped. All I wanted to do was playing the piano.
Actually no, I didn’t.
This is true however: my first memories are watching soccer on TV and until I was ten or so, a soccer star was what I wanted to be growing up. And score goals like this, which I still remember watching with my father:
The piano I played because my mother told me to, starting at age six. Well, not entirely true either. Growing up with three bigger sisters could sometimes be a challenge to a little red-haired boy, but when I discovered that I was quicker at learning to play the piano than all my sisters, now THAT was a motivation.
I was not bad at soccer, but the piano was where my successes came as a child, somewhat to my surprise. I made my first concert performance when I was eight, playing Bach and Mozart: I couldn’t believe the attention and praise I got. All I had done was practice every day, like my mother told me to.
When I was in third grade, I got quite a taste for how the piano could give some sweet success in life. My mother recorded me with a cassette player, sent the cassette with a letter that I wrote to a youth program on Swedish Television called Diskotaket. Incredibly enough, they listened to it (making recordings myself for many years now, I really wonder how that recording quality was…) and a few weeks later, there was a letter from Swedish Television asking me to come play on the show. I played Mozart’s Alla Turca and was interviewed by Julius and Finn Alberth, the hosts.
This TV-show basically had the staging of a night club with a live band playing and young people dancing on the floor. So imagine the contrast with a little boy playing Mozart in the middle of it all. I was nine, but I did find it interesting to have all these pretty girls around the piano! Here is the end credits of this show, this is Swedish TV, end of the 70s.
The next day at school I was the center of everything. It is hard to imagine today the impact a television show in Sweden made at that time if it was popular. A few years later, I would experience this with an even higher, crazy intensity.
I kept practicing the piano, but still liked soccer better. When I was twelve, I auditioned to play as a soloist with the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra. I was selected and therefore made my debut in Mozart’s “Elvira Madigan”-concerto, the third movement. People say kids don’t know to be nervous, but I was incredibly nervous. It all went well, the reviewer raved, and again I was surprised at the praise.
When I was a kid, practicing piano was not something I really wanted to do. If a kid at age 8 prefers to play classical pieces on the piano instead of playing soccer outside, good for them, but I was not one of those kids. I needed someone to push me. My mother had this method: she would take a piece of paper, write down the pieces I worked on one by one, and after each piece make a line of empty squares, kind of like in crosswords. For each time I played through the piece, I could put a cross in one square. When all squares were filled, I was done. You could say my practice sheet looked like a shopping list.
If I had done something bad, for example when I got escorted home by police after throwing a rock at a truck with a couple of friends at age 9, I could expect many, many empty squares. At the same time, the piano was a retreat, a shield from my mother’s anger when I had done something stupid (which was a common thing). It was my “snickerboa” for those of you who knows Astrid Lindgren’s “Emil”. When I played the piano, I was safe from getting yelled at.
My parents went away for the evening, and it was only me and my elder sisters. I still had many crosses to put in. So, I tentatively start to ask my sisters that maybe they could give me a break here? How about they tell my parents that I actually played the pieces all those times but I watch TV instead?
No, is the answer. They won’t lie for me.
“Ah, come on, you can do that, I practice eeeeevery day.”
“But it is not right to lie, just play your pieces”
“Hm… what if I owe you a chocolate bar?”
Silence. “Well…” Whispering among them. “Alright, one chocolate bar each, but you still play half of the pieces.”
Done deal.
About the same time as I played with Helsingborg Symphony, my mother contacted Swedish Television again. While Diskotaket was a rather popular show, the one she targeted now was the biggest of them all. Lennart Hyland, the number one legend of all time in Swedish radio and television, was going to make a comeback with his talkshow Hyland Hörna. It was a program that had been an incredible succes – in 1965, over four million of Sweden’s 7 million people watched it. Now it was 1981 and the anticipation was huge. After the letter and the cassette, I was asked to play in the first program, which would be the one getting most attention. It was broadcast live, me and my mother traveled in first class with train to Stockholm, stayed in a hotel (what an adventure all that meant), met Hyland who the night before the show was in a terrible mood.
For anyone who has been on the set of a nationally televised live program, you know the focus, tension and tempo is insane. I saw up close the transformation of an artist: the seconds before his entry, Hyland looked worried, nervous and on the edge. Once the cameras went live, he turned on his performing persona – relaxed, charming and with a charisma you could not resist. The show started, everything felt surreal, I was incredibly nervous, played Schumann’s Aufschwung, and Hyland loved it. A detail I remember was that I had the idea that I should speak into the microphone, and Hyland never lifted his handmic to my face – instead I leaned forward to the mic every time I answered his questions, undoubtedly creating a comical effect, which added to the entertainment.
In an interview many years later, I was able to see a little bit of it, not the leaning forward though.
The comeback show was a huge success. The day after, all the newspaper bills outside every store in the country had a big picture of Hyland, and on a couple of them I was in the picture, too. About a third of the content in the papers was about the show. This was national television back in the days. Journalists called our home, and some people even went to stand outside our house to wait to see if I would come out. I wasn’t too carried away though, I had a feeling it would all pass eventually and playing the piano would once again mostly be about filling in empty squares with crosses.
Chapter II coming on May 1
Per Tengstrand 