Goran Agdur

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Biography: Göran Agdur - as he is -
Excerpt from music journalist Anders Ahlberg (on Swedish daily papers ’Expressen’ & ’NST’) criticism of Göran Agdur’s works refering to the music on three LP discs on which Goran plays his own compositions for piano:

"I am not a devoted lover of piano music. But already at the first meeting with Goran Agdur’s compositions I was charmed more than I ever imagined possible. And this experience has deepened with each listening.

The technically perfect can sometimes give way to his emotional outflow. However this also becomes a source of strength. For it is in
line with what Göran wants to say with his music : the flood of sensations and feelings that pour out of him at the piano.

I do not think it is wrong to call Göran Agdur a romantic. Not that he escapes reality into the sweet, light blue vapor but because the strong anchoring his music has in feelings and thoughts. The compositions are formed by a temperament.

At the same time Goran Agdur’s music has much in the heritage of the traditional Nordic music, from folk song to the "major" Symphony. The melodies and sounds are calling up images and intense colors.

At concerts Goran Agdur play with a violinist. In the three LP records I listened to, he is alone at the piano and the grand piano. It increases the pressure on him and his playing, but this also means that he will be highly personal in the music. It is between him and the listener everything happens. That this is important Göran suggests himself. It has not been been easy for him to work with engineers and producers, especially those who have not known him and his music.
It will always ”land” between him and the finished result.

It has happened a lot with Göran Agdur’s music from the first disc to the third. "Piano Music", the first, is powerful and pompous, baroque can be the right word. Goran is working with massive chords, to the brim full of sounds. Charging the move and almost hunting the listener, at times breathtaking. All is delivered in grandious portions, as if Göran sometimes is afraid it wouldn’t arrive to us otherwise.

What happens on the latter two discs is that he dares more and Goran becomes confident in what he wants and what he can. It is less congested chords and more sophistication. And the music has still not lost in the personality and strength. On the contrary, it is clearer.

The short fantasies of the last disc, ”Café Despair”, is the best he has done so far. Here are the small ”musical wonderings” more condensed and coherent than before. In addition, Göran has introduced new and strange impressions and nuances, a sort of ”new blues”.

Goran Agdur’s music is perhaps not so easy to come by, but it's all worth it.

"Piano Music" - Agdur 7810/SAM

"Nest of Silence" - Fermat FLPS 29

"Café Despair" - Agdur 8001/SAM

Excerpt from an interview with Göran Agdur by the very same journalist Anders Ahlberg (’Expressen’ / ’NST’):

Göran Agdur is a composer and pianist. Do you have the picture clear for you? A white-hot sexagenarian with prophile as a hawk, long thin fingers and impeccable dress suit, a man of great devotional concert halls. You're wrong. Göran Agdur is a very ordinary guy with round glasses and curly hair: On the days he plays for the elderly and the sick, in the evening, he’s a movie theater usher. And he writes and plays music, strong and beautiful as a spring flood.

Listening to Göran Agdur’s bubbling piano music from the CDs I hitherto been supplied with, is to feel a part of himself. I’m curious. Who is he behind the melodies, the tones and the impulses?

We meet Göran Agdur at Café Christina in Old Town in Stockholm (where else?). It’s stone cold winter. Together we thaw out over a pot of coffee. Cautiously we get closer to the point, the interview is taking off.

For Göran music began with a square piano in the living room in Sundsvall, a town situated at the north east cost of Sweden, where his father worked at Tornborg & Lundberg with excavators. He was not many years when he began playing on the instrument and found tones, timbres and melodies back the keys. During his school age he went to the municipal music school. Among his teachers were Gunnar Söderblom and Sigurd Ågren, but he often felt that the teaching in musical education was rigid. What he liked best was to learn from Valdemar Söderholm's "Theory of Harmonic" and invent own pieces of music. He developed a problematic relationship with the notation that he felt very different from the immediate experience of the music. He made his own way to memorize his music in symbols, where the eye could see more what the ear heard.

- I played on my own. Actually, I am more self-taught than ”schooled”. and educated. Early, I began to improvise on the piano. That was how I developed my playing and made progress. I now encourage all parents to have some type of instrument at home, where their children, except for themselves of course, can find expression for their feelings.


Göran’s interest in music began with rock and pop music.

- My oldest brother Ulf played classical on the piano while my second elder brother Bjorn were greasers and drove around town looking for girls in a Ford-58: a and subsequently in an Chevrolet Impala Hard Top. Those who made the biggest impression on me were a few singers from the late fifties and early sixties: John Leyton, Billy Fury, Roy Orbison, Del Shannon, Gene Pitney, Nico Fidenco and Salvatore Adamo. The highlight was to be picked up from soccer practice in the Chevy brother Bjorn drove and sit between him and his girlfriend in the front. I think it was like that I got to hear Del Shannon's "Keep Searchin ” for the very first time ...

Göran lets me take part in some of these to him so very dear memories, which now easily flows out of his mouth. It is clear that somewhere around here we can trace the seeds of the early music impression that perhaps inspires him most in his later music.

- I still remember crystal clear how brother Bjorn and I one morning crept in under his bed where his half broken Grundig tape recorder stood. He had recorded a new song in the night directly from Radio Luxembourg, which I now heard for the first time: "Johnny Remember Me" by Geoff Goddard sung by John Leyton. Angel choirs ... longing. Some other unforgettable first impressions were listening to Roy Orbison's "Running Scared", Nico Fidenco's "Su neil cielo (What a Sky). I remember the cover on the single record: A man with sad eyes rollin’an empty glass in his hands at the bar ... The first time I heard Gene Pitney's "Mecca ... and when runnin’ on the beach in St Raphael in France, or was it S: St Maxime, to buy Coca Cola to my brother and his girlfriend, I heard a fantastic song that flowed from the Jukebox. I sang the chorus for my brother when I came back to him. After some research he concluded that it was Salvatore Adamo's "Du Boulot Du Soleil". The singer who became my great favorite was Billy Fury. I even learned that he prefered egg and bacon for breakfast ... The songs of Billy that sort of etched itself into me directly was "I'll never quite get over you", "Maybe tomorrow" and "In Thoughts of You".

After this I was teased at school because I was listening to all these "butter singers", as my classmates called them, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones broke through in the sixties.

- My first contact with classical music I got once in Huddinge Municipal Music School outside Stockholm when I asked to play four-handed with Stina, a girl, one year older than me, that I was hopelessly in love in.

Göran moved around in Sweden when his father changed his job with construction equipment and the whole family was forced to move.

- I remember when playing Bartok's "Für Kinder" my Mom yelling from the kitchen that I'm probably playing some tones wrong, though it was like that it was supposed to sound…

The deep interest in music, all the impressions from the lived life and daydreaming at the piano, grew into his own music. Göran began composing. It was and is, music very close to himself.

- Playing the piano is a way to express myself. I feel something in the life we live, develop an idea from that and start spinning round it, it becomes and grows into tones and melodies from the feelings themselves. Gradually, I try to attain the right expression. Some form of system, I have not. The form will emerge itself. Ones out here it seems the pieces can not be different.


The head and hands full with music but without strict training in musical notation, Göran creates his own way of writing down his music in order to remember it. Now that he masters the wholesome traditional notescript, he has also begun to rewrite his old material. A hardship he lets me know.

- If you once create some piece in an imaginative form in a certain mood tied to place, time and environment…something that was in the air at that specific time, it may feel wrong somehow to connect the rational to it and it becomes really hard to write it down.


But music is something that must be shared between people. We agree that the formal knowledge is needed. Göran is now studying music at the university and he has been taking lessons in counterpoint for Hans Eklund at the Music Academy in Stockholm. The fear that his musical imagination must be cracked has been released.

- I have nothing to lose to learn the craft. It is not smothering sensation, on the contrary, it provides support. As one of my friends Mats Dufvenmark, an amazing pianist, puts it : "notation is simply a stairway upwards..."

- And of course in these my life experiences live the stories and telling from ”the other, from You, the history we share together, the ”being here” together, trying as we so often do – to make the best of a bad situation! - 2 b continued read "Impressum"