Attendance, the flyer said, would be capped at 90. I’d guess that the chapel in New York’s Church of Sweden — on 48th Street just off Fifth Avenue, unobtrusive among financial offices and gleaming glass hotels — seated 75 at most, and a few songs into her set, Frida Hyvönen suggested that those standing come sit in the aisles. This they did.
I’ve been getting more and more enveloped in Hyvönen’s new album Silence Is Wild as the days go by. (I’m not as familiar with her debut, Until Death Comes, which I picked up tonight; I’ll be curious to re-read Jessica Hopper on both discs once I’ve given each more of a listen.) It’s somber and confessional in places, and joyous in others, and there’s a strange sense of detachment I hear in some of her songs that I find incredibly affecting. By way of a lengthy aside: I’m currently working on a review of Alejandro Zambra’s novella Bonsai. Zambra utilizes any number of distancing devices over the course of his narrative — extended metaphors, metafictional speculation, situations whose parallels feel elaborately constructed — and yet, those don’t hide the central ache that suffuses the book. Instead, their prominence ends up pointing out the specific emotions that they’re ostensibly cloaking.
The show was minimal: Hyvönen seated before a piano, sometimes signing a few random bars before beginning a song, sometimes standing to stretch between songs. A colleague joined her for harmony vocals for several songs, and the set seemed to lean more towards Until Death Comes than Silence Is Wild, if my post-show calculations were correct. Hyvönen’s voice resonated over the course of an emotionally winding set, and the crowd listened quietly, respectfully. The feeling throughout was a relaxed one, Hyvönen occasionally addressing the audience in Swedish. Towards the end of the night, she indicated that a song’s ending was something close to a sing-a-long. “Sing along,” she said, and then let loose a wicked grin. “If you dare.”
And after everything was over, the church’s rector blessed us all. It was not a bad way to spend a night at a small Swedish church in midtown Manhattan.