Magnus Granberg

Es Schwindelt Mir, Es Brennt Mein Eingeweide ("I’m Dizzy, My Viscera Burns") finds Swedish composer Magnus Granberg refining his art of meditative ensemble writing in a single long-form work. Drawing inspiration from Schubert’s "Die Winterreise," Granberg selects and processes melodic fragments, filtering them through his unique syntax of open-form composition and collective improvisation. Rather than direct quotation, the references to Schubert are spectral: shuffled and stretched, turned into slow-moving harmonic clouds that hover over a tapestry of clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano.

Granberg’s ensemble practice, refined over years with groups like Skogen, mobilizes each player as a discerning listener more than as a soloist. The musicians  - collaborators known for subtlety and poise - thread lines that sometimes meet in glancing harmonies, sometimes hover in luminous friction. The music draws on extended duration and slow cyclical forms, allowing moments of quiet turbulence, unease, and suspended lyricism to emerge and dissolve. Silences become charged; changes occur by re-weighting fractions of the musical field rather than through dramatic shifts.

Instead of narrative or overt drama, Granberg’s writing invokes a sense of haunting continuity - a state in which memory, anticipation, and sensation coexist. Es Schwindelt Mir, Es Brennt Mein Eingeweide is less a portrait of motion than of transformation: a space where time stretches, fragments refract, and the possibility of song is both ever-present and always deferred. The result is enduring and quietly radical, reaffirming that the most intimate and expressive encounters in music may arise within the slowest, most attentive listening.