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Sat, 2010-07-03 09:12


Row 1 from left:
Concert-shoes
Nikey and Puma basketballshoes - I wear them on stage and when I play basketball. I also wear the Puma in everyday life. So do I with the three others. The first converse shoes are "moods of norway"-converse which I often wear with the suits from "moods". Converse was also the first brand my parents bought me for playing basketball when I was 7. The love for converse will allways be there. The last pair of converse is in silver, cause I like to shine. On stage and in life in general. When I go out dancing, which I love to do - you allways see me in the silver converse, shaking it makeing the silver sparkle like James Brown doin´ it on stage. When ever James Brown is heard, I am seen on the dance floor. I love funk music. I also dig Earth wind and fire, Bee Gees and of course Prince.

Row 2 from left
Gershwin- and golden shoes
I started wearing the black and white ones when I did my Gershwin solo recitals and when performing the Gershwin piano concertos with orchestra. Gives me that old school feeling. They are also my favorite dancing shoes in weddings! The golden shoes makes me feel like a gold medal winning athlete, wearig the medal on me feet, and makeing everybody see wich path I have taken. The golden one.

Row 3 from left
Beach, water central park and Brazil
Beach sandales - I grew up next to the sea. I love the beach and can spend a whole day next to the sea doing absolutely nothing, or absolutely everything one would need to do in day. If I need to practise, I just bring my music scores with me to the beach, and read it while the sun is flirting with my skin.

Blue Helly Hansen shoes. Actually made for sailing - in august this year I´m organizing a Café de Concert sailboat regatta, with the Café de Concert logo on all sails.
(Read more about the concept here www.cafedeconcert.no) I also wear them on my chamber music festival in the Caribbean sea, we often perform on sailingboats. Need to have a good grip on the floor - and on the piano pedals.

Old school tennis shoes - comfortable, allways cool to wear. These are probably the ones you see me in the most, strolling down the street with my smokeing notebook and my pencil on fire, writing down new ideas and music. You can also see them one on top of the other when I am sitting on benches in parks. Trying to hear what the benches have to say. Can you imagine how many secrets benches all over the world know? How many love stories, tragedies, proposals, confessions and international secrets don´t they know of? Imagine if benches could talk...I love to wonder off in parks. Physically and mentally. Yes, these ones are definetly my walk in the park-shoes. See you in Central Park on Sunday morning?

Brazilian style - Statement. If you are wondering about which brand for man which has the coolest shape, most stylish colors and feel like female hands massageing your feet while walking? The answer is simple. Ferracini.

Row 4 from left:
I am Norwegian
A couple of months every year you see me in my cross country skiing-shoes, skiing in the Norwegian forests and on mountains, jumping around in deep snow in my Helly Hansen orange snow shoes or
you probably see me on my ass after a terrible fall on the ice with my ice skates. I must admit I am not a world champion on the ice, even if my skates were in gold - but I love it. Simply love ice-skateing! Last time I went ice-skateing in Central park I was skateing with a former ice-skateing queen. She did all these funky jumps and stuff. Everybody was clapping and admiering what she did. I saw the people, I heard the clapping - I went for it.
I flew through the air like nobody ever before. Everybody went quiet when I was floating helplessly in space. I landed. Not like Bambi on ice, more like Ferdinand the Bull. And I landed on my iphone, in my chest pocket. The audience went crazy, clapping more than ever. Laughing their asses off. So did I. I stood up, took a bow, and got several new friends that day. God, how I love ice-skateing!

Mon, 2010-06-28 05:07


I´d like you to get to know this guy called Harri. He´s Estonian and lives in Tallin. When ever he opens his mouth it´s either with mindblowing information about something supersmart or so funny that you really don´t know what hit you, you just burst out into laughter. Sometimes he even makes you laugh without opening his mouth. Just by looking at you. Harri is one of those people which is blessed with the talent of beeing talented at absolutely everything he does. Just now he has his own garage where he fixes old cars - Pimp my ride MTV, you got a thing or two to learn from this guy! But there is something more to this Harri Tiidus than his wonderful cars and more I can explain on paper. Harri is a conceptual person - you can even see it in the way he fixes his cars. When ever he gets an idea, the idea turnes into a conceptual flavour not represented in the colors of the rainbow. Harri paints with his own colors. Amazing. When ever you are in Tallin, look him up and get a taste of a genious mind. Harri and I are now planning to have an orchestra perform in his garage. And I´m makeing some sketches for a piece for orchestra and a car/motorcycle soloist... And PS - when I´ll be in Talin next week I´ll definetly be renting one of Harri´s cars. Need a ride?;)









Mon, 2010-06-28 03:50


In one week I´ll be performing in the wonderful and very original Nano Café in Tallin, which I wrote about earlier.
When I was there recently I had a very interesting meeting with Beatrice, the Nano-entrepeneur and model agent, Annely Abel, a supersmart catch from Innovation Norway, Pille Lill Music Foundation, CdC´s super effective producers in Estonia, Svetlana Puzjorjova, a yet undiscovered ultra gifted designer and Helen Löhmus, probably Estonias most productive creative soul - which knows the whole world, and also has it in the palm of her hands. In october we will all collaborate on stage under the Aksel Kolstad Show with some pretty wild ideas! Look forward to it, guys!!



Svetlana will be blogging about one of the projects for the concert on my blog so you can follow the developement of our idea! Will be in Tallin from July 4th until July 15th. Performing chambermusic in Tallin and in Pärnu with great Estonian musicians, looking very much forward to that!


Beatrice, left, Svetlana, right.

But right now, I´m chillin´ in Dalyan in Turkey with my for ever young and super sporty mum and dad. Relaxing and prepareing for new tasks. I travel much these days - in monkeyclass as often reffered to (with one adventurous ecxeption...) But when ever I travel with papa mafia - we travel 1st class. Dad, I take my hat off for you!!



Mon, 2010-06-21 16:09


The "Norwegian"-airplane leaving from Oslo to Tallin on June 15th unfortunately got hit by a vehicle on the ground. We had to change aircraft and the very nice crew wondered if somebody would volunteer to eventually sit in maybe not so confortable seats, due to the smaller plane we had to change to. Of course I said yes - and boy was I happy I did!! The most wonderful and super skilled pilots Petter and Lars made this trip - like a trip I am sure no drugs on this planet can match!! I am also sure everybody that didn´t volunteer were quite sorry when they saw where I got to sit in the end...mohahahaha!!

Another lucky guy was Ulf - Ulf is an underdog pokerplaying supernice guy really hitting it off these days, he just won a huge tournament online, bringing him to the big league in Tallin. All the best to you, Ulf! (Hm, maybe I should invest some money in this kid!)



Having said that - there is one more thing that has to be said. Petter and Lars - when Café de Concert get´s its own Café de Concert-plane, YOU will be hired as pilots! (PS: we just bought a BMW, so we´re getting there!!)



Love you guys! Thank´s for beeing such amazeing people! Norwegian should be proud to have you on their team!
And MAN, was that a great landing, Lars!!



Sat, 2010-06-19 06:52


Vitalij Vasilievitch and his wonderful crew consisting of his son Artem and Artem´s cousin Elena - is doing an absolutely marvellous job in Russia, produceing great concerts with some outstanding musicians. In addition to that Vasilievitch has a vision and a force greater than most cultural entrepeneurs. His will to unite and collaborate is remarkable. And because of that Vasilievitch gets done more than most people can handle with two hands only.



It was a great pleausre to work with him, and this is just the beginning of many more projects in Russia, lead by "Vasilievitch and his magnificant duo".



This September I will envite musicians from Vasilievitch´s inner pocket and present them in my Café de Concert festival in Fredrikstad, Norway. If you have the chance to be there, don´t miss it!

Check out what Russian TV made out of the last concert in Pskov:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2BjTzHH7Jk





Sun, 2010-06-13 22:05


After driving from St.Petersburg to the concert in Novgorod in 3 hours, a 4 hours road trip awaited us the day after.
As you can see, Artem (one of the fabulous producers - more on them in my next blog) didn´t quite know in which direction he´d point out the way to Pskov after we had driven for a while, so I guess he just posed for the camera:)
Igor, our magnificant camerman, drove us the whooole time! Igor - you are the man! And a man of action - cause we really
didn´t know where we were going....



Never the less, we made it in the end!
And hey - I got to play in front of a castle!!!! I´d drive anywhere for that!
Some last minute tuning needed to be done after a TV-interview, and then Pskov got to know this shy musician from Norway.


Many thank´s to the wonderful translator Valeria Isaeva for her outstanding english and super funky shoes!!





MAN, what a tour this has been! Many, many thank´s to Vitalij Vasilievitch and his magnificant crew! I´ll let all of you readers in on just how fantastic they are, and what superb work they do for fine arts in Russia in my following blog. And then, maybe some unofficial photos from the tour...what do you say guys? Ready for some party pics? Well see ;)

Thu, 2010-06-10 20:49


Novgorod - the home town of Rachmaninov, and so many other historical personalities and events! Before I went on stage I made sure Rachmaninov knew exactly where he had me. With my hat off. Then I put on my Nike´s and grooved as much as I could in Novgorod Philharmonic Concert Hall, hopeing that Rachmaninov would shake it in his grave! At least it made the audience get up out of their chairs at the end of the concert, that was fun :) Next stop Pskov - after a 4 hour roadtrip tomorrow morning. Gospodi!!!




P.S.: The dude with the shield...was the Danish King Rurik, who freakin´ ruled all of Russia almost 1000 years ago! Damn....Respect to the Danes!


And these bells made Rachmaninov groove in his famous c sharp minor prelude...
Wed, 2010-06-09 23:10


A full house was waiting for me in a concert hall covered in gold. Yes, I felt as alive as never before. My heart was beating faster than ever, but once I heard the first chords of Mozart in the orchestra I dissapeared into another world. Yesterday night I felt totally inspired by everything here in St.Petersburg, so I wrote one cadenza for each movement in Mozart´s piano concerto nr. 11 in Rachmaninov-style, which I performed for the first time this evening at the Catherine Palace in Pushkin. The audience seemed to like it as they shouted bravo already after the first movement. That sure inspired me even more :) We finished off the concert with Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. The ochestra was super funky and the conductor, my very good friend Mikhael, was totally awsome! Lovely audience, absolutely lovely!! It´s 3 am in the morning now, and I need to pack my bags and get some sleep before I set off at 8 am for a solo performance in Novgorod in the evening. "I love this game" :)







Mon, 2010-06-07 15:09



Today I had the first rehersal with the orchestra and after that there was arranged a pressconference in St.Petersburg Center of Culture, where I met some very interesting people! The Norwegian Counselor was also there, very cool guy! Second rehersal with orchestra tomorrow and then I´m plannig to rock around the clock at the summer palace of Ekaterina on the 9th with Mozart and Gershwin. Great conductor, by the way - will write more about him later! And what do you know - at the hotel I am staying at I found a good upright piano the hotel so kindly allowed me to practise on, so now I don´t have to walk more than to floors down, before I see my beloved black and white keys...Man! I might get fat from all of this luxurious practising...so time for some sit-ups!



Sun, 2010-06-06 16:04


Ok...This just blew my mind!
Today was my first day practising in St.Peterburg. When I first heard that the piano was located in a old trainstation, I sort of thougt to my self...weeeell, I´m allways up for adventures, so why not see where this one takes me! And then I walk into the trainstation...and up these majestic stairs (going...what the f...??) - and then this grand concert hall seduced my eyes in a second. It turns out that even Richard Strauss has been performing here. So I said: Ok, I can manage to practise here for a couple of hours...!!!!





...and ps: St.Petersburg is amazeing!!







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