Presscuts

The King of Fools is more than a chamber opera. It's part of the clinical record of a leap forward in mental-health care, a patient's-eye view starting when Elgard Jonsson, after a traumatic childhood and a schizophrenic crisis at age sixteen, entered a mental hospital in the summer of 1967.

"Curiously inspiring, however, is Carl Unander-Scharin´s "Tokfursten", a fearless examination of Schizophrenia, couched in a musical language, at once wide-ranging yet tautly disciplined."

“Typical of Tokfursten was also that it succeeded in telling this controversial contemporary story without losing opera’s demand as a genre for timelessness. The inner worlds of the king of fools are strongly portrayed.

“Now the entire opera is on CD. This is not a product for entertainment. But since the listener can follow all the lines in a well-designed booklet which also offers rich pictorial material, the recording should give rise to interesting conversations between friends. It was a gripping experience to be in the opera audience in Vadstena.

“The Vadstena Academy’s successful opera Tokfursten about a teenager’s “seven years in the madhouse” has now become a double CD. The music inexorably beats forth feelings of anxiety, confusion and hallucinations, contrasted with the cool routines of the staff and occasional points of rest, all in a fine young interpretation.”
 

“This opera by Carl Unander-Scharin, based on Elgard Jonsson’s novel and given its world première in 1996 by the Vadstena Academy (with funding from Concerts Sweden), has now been released on CD and is an exclusive work of lasting value in the late autumn’s flood of recordings.

“The immediate merits of Tokfursten include the fact that it is entertaining without renouncing the serious aspects.

“Originally a singer, Carl Unander-Scharin created for the Vadstena Academy in the summer of 1996 this operatic adaptation of Elgard Jonsson’s autobiography about his emergence from schizophrenia. The debut was Unander-Scharin’s first full-format opera and was sensational in all respects.

“This is a work of musical drama at once dark and colourful. It takes place in a clinic: nothing other than a nightmare world for those who are there and for those who are watching the drama unfold.