December afternoon in Helsingborg

This is the dark season in Scandinavia. Fortunately there are nice
 Christmas lights in Helsingborg that brighten up the scenery ... :-)

A tribute to Ulrik Neumann - a wonderful musician in a great musical family



Three posters from the exhibition at the Theatre Museum.

There is a great number of musical families in the history of music. The best known is perhaps the Bach family. In Scandinavia the Danish-Swedish Neumann family is another fine example.

Right now you can see an interesting little exhibition, "The Neumanns - 150 years on the stage", at the Theatre Museum in Malmö.

The guitarist, singer, actor and composer Ulrik Neumann (1918 - 1994) is  probably the internationally most well known member of the family. Together with his sister Gerda he toured successfully in Europe already in the 1940s.

In 1958 - 1961 Ulrik Neumann performed together with jazz violinist Svend Asemussen and Swedish singer Alice Babs in the Swe-Danes trio, in my opinion one of the finest European jazz- and entertainment ensembles ever to hit the stage.

Scandinavian shuffle became a signature song for the Swe-Danes:

Here Alice Babs and Ulrik Neumann perform a wonderful version of  Hoagy Carmichael's "Two sleepy people":

 



Ulrik Neumann's  Love Walz is a classic in the guitar repertoire:

Ulrik's son Mikael and Mikael's son Tobias are continuing the Neumann family's impressive 150 year old musical and stage tradition, shown in this "family tree", which is part of the exhibition at the Malmö Theatre Museum:

Rowanberries

This time of the year rowanberries are a nice addition to the autumn colours. The red rowanberries are also an important food resource for many birds during the long winter season here in Scandinavia.

Rowanberries can of course also be used as a spice or as an ingredient for jelly.

 

Rowanberries - excellent winter food for birds.

The start of the 2013 Scandinavian cruise season

The AIDAstella opened the Copenhagen (and Scandinavian) cruise season already on March 18. The next visitors were AIDAbella (April 15) and AIDAcara (April 16). From this week on the number of visiting cruise ships will increase considerably.

This morning the MSC Musica (292m x 34m) was approaching Helsingborg/Helsingør on its way to Copenhagen:

Half an hour earlier, at about 8 AM, the AIDAbella passed by:

Christmas lights and decorations brighten up the dark season in Scandinavia

This time of the year it is rather dark in Scandinavia. Not many hours of daylight. But people like to brighten up their homes with various types of creative Christmas lights and decorations. Tonight I made a short walk in my immediate neighborhood here in Hittarp (southern Sweden) in order to document some of the newly added decorative elements:

This is the community Christmas tree

PS
What was new to me, as a fairly recent member of my local community, was that many people already now have installed their Christmas trees in their living rooms. Since my early childhood in another Nordic country, I have always done it on Christmas Eve.

CMA CGM Marco Polo - the world's largest container ship - visits Hamburg on its maiden voyage

The 16,020 standard container capacity of the CMA CGM Marco Polo would equate to a line of heavy goods vehicles around 138 kilometres long. 

In the early morning hours on Wednesday, December 12, the CMA CGM Marco Polo, the world's largest container ship, with a capacity of 16,020 standard containers, arrived in Hamburg on its first visit to a contintental European port. The 396 x 53,6 m mega-ship left Southampton two days earlier on its maiden voyage.

Both ships and they way they are loaded/unloaded have developed a lot during the last few decades. It's not SO long ago, when busy ports looked like this:

The French CMA CGM has two other ships of the same class as Marco Polo, in the pipeline for April next year. 

However, the CMA CGM will not hold the largest container ship title for very long. Danish Maersk, the largest container ship operator in the world, will already next summer take delivery of the first ship in the so-called Triple-E series, with a capacity of 18,270 containers.

The competition between the two major operators, Maersk and CMA CGM, tightens. Let's hope there are enough full containers for them to carry on the Seven Seas! 

We are not going to see giants like the CMA CGM Marco Polo here in the Sound - they are just too big. Instead one can hope that they will bring more work opportunities for feeder ships - like the one pictured below - which carry containers from Scandinavian ports to Hamburg and the other big continental container terminals. 

Christmas lights in Helsingborg

Christmas lights brighten up the dark season in Scandinavia. Here are some of the lights in Helsingborg, southern Sweden:

The magic of the Nordic summer night

The Washington Post in 1982: "Nothing has prepared us for the astonishing exhibit that goes on view tomorrow at the Corcoran Gallery. 'Northern Light' is so good it is scary. It will leave the viewer shaken".

The first time I saw Richard Berg´s painting "A Nordic summer evening" was at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1982. This later iconic painting was included in the major Northern Light exhibition, which introduced Nordic turn-of-the-century art to wider American and international audiences. Berg´s painting, permanently on display at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, manages to convey the magic light of the Nordic summer evenings better than any other painting I know of.

Last night at about 10 P.M. there was something of the same magic in the air, when I took the photo below from my balcony. The blue from the Chinese wisteria added a nice blue glow to the scenery.

The music to listen to this time of the year is Summer night by the Danish composer Mogens Schrader. Here the song, which hauntingly catches the atmosphere of "the subdued light of midsummer nights", is  performed by the great Jussi Björling: 

The AIDAcara opens the 2012 Scandinavian cruise season

AIDAcara approaching Helsingør at about 06.30 this morning

AIDAcara, the smallest ship in the AIDA Cruises fleet, has opened the Copenhagen (and Scandinavian) 2012 cruise season. The ship made its first Scandinavian cruise already on April 6. The picture on this page is from this mornining, when AIDAcara arrived for its second cruise this season.

The 193 x32 m AIDAcara, previously called Das Clubschiff, entered into service in 1996.

Altogether 375 cruise ship visits and about 840.000 passengers are expected in Copenhagen this year. The busiest days for cruise ships in Copenhagen will be June 3 and 23, and July 7 and 28. On each of these days about 25.000 cruise guests will visit the capital city of Denmark. On thing is certain: The quayside in front of the The Little Mermaid will be crowded on those dates!

Here is a nice video showing AIDAcara in the Kiel Canal last summer:

Homage to the Delta Rhytm Boys

I have many fond memories of the American vocal group the Delta Rhytm Boys, first formed in 1934 in Langston, Oklahoma, and active for over 50 years. They had many fans in Europe - particularly in Scandinavia - since the 50´s. My favourite singer in the group, the wonderful bass Lee Gaines, died of cancer in Helsinki, Finland in 1987. Hugh Bryant, another fine member, collapsed while performing at Gaines´s funeral and died, probably from a heart failure. 

The Delta Rhythm Boys were later inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame.

Here the Delta Rhytm Boys perform the spiritual "Joshua Fit De Battle Of Jericho" in a Finnish film: 

The Delta Rhytm Boys´ 1951 version of the popular Swedish tune "flickorna i Småland" (the girls in Småland) became a great hit in Scandinavia:

Here you can find out  more about the Delta Rhytm Boys story.

Midsummer music in Scandinavia

W. Åhlén´s "Summer psalm" is here beautifully sung by the Koritsia choir of Lund, Sweden

Today we have celebrated Midsummer day in Scandinavia. This beautiful summer psalm, by the Swedish composer Waldemar Åhlén is among my own favourite summer music, to be enjoyed during the almost nightless Nordic summer days ....

The first shots of spring

(click on photo for larger image)

Today I went out to have a look at the (somewhat sad state of the) garden. Up here in Scandinavia, we are still in the middle of winter, so I was surprised to see the first small - very small - signs of spring. Don´t ask me what they are, as I am quite new to the garden - and gardening in general - and the plants were planted by somebody else. Let´s hope that these first spring signs are not out too early - some quite cold days are forecasted.