“He was our grandfather.” “He was the grandfather of all of us.” Reactions on Friday 28 August to the news that Norway’s King Harald V has died this morning are frequently expressed during the 30th-anniversary edition of Hardanger Music Festival – Hardanger Musikkfest. On the festival’s second day, his passing casts a shadow.
In the central Norway fjord-side village of Lofthus, about two-and-a-half hours east of Bergen, there is an unexpected need to rethink how the festival would work on the day, and during a period of national mourning. A Friday evening concert was meant to showcase members of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK) and singer Ingunn Dalland. Billed as Disco Night, it was reconfigured to feature contemplative music: string quartets, a vocal version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” A few hours earlier, what was trailed as the Jubilee Concert – 30 Years of Hardanger Music Festival! acknowledged the sombre mood with a minute’s silence.
Signs outside the festival’s venues are headed Memorial Protocol. Each reads “We are saddened by the passing of King Harald and are deeply grateful for his long reign. We pray for the royal family and for the whole country. In this special time, this is a time for thanksgiving for us as a people and a nation.” (pictured right, the statue of Edvard Grieg in the grounds of the Hotel Ullensvang)
Lofthus is not big. The resident population is 600. Its economy centres on farming. Apple orchards fringe the community and blanket the slopes between the buildings and the daunting mountain peaks above the village. Plums are grown too, as are, in lesser amounts, cherries. Tourism is also central. The Hotel Ullensvang – Lofthus is within the Ullensvang municipality – accommodates around 340 people. It opened in 1846 as a boathouse-come-lodgings and has been expanded many times.
Edvard Grieg was a regular at the hotel, first visiting in 1877. What’s dubbed his “Composing Cabin” is in the grounds of the hotel. Beside it is a wooden statue representing him which could do with some love: its left foot is damaged. His Lofthus compositions include parts of Peer Gynt, the String Quartet in G minor, Opus 27 and sections of the Holberg Suite. Fittingly, after the Ullensvang Skulemusikklag, the local school’s traditional marching band begin proceedings at Friday’s Jubilee Concert at the hotel’s Hardangerhallen, the main programme opened with “Air,” from the Holberg Suite. It was composed less than a minute’s walk away.
The anniversary festival has a theme. “‘Spark’,” explains the programme, is “the small thing that sets something big in motion. A spark can ignite between people, in an encounter with nature, or when music strikes its first note. It can be brief and fleeting, or it can take on a life of its own, burning on and spreading.” In practice, a particular – and unforeseen – “spark” engendered by the passing of King Harald is a trigger feeding into the ripples generated by being at the epicentre of Grieg's creativity and experiencing live, contemporary music inspired by the immediate environment. (pictured left, The Ullensvang Skullemusikklag at Hardangerhallen, opening the Jubilee Concert)
On the Thursday, at Lofthus’ community hall Krossvoll – really, a theatre proper – Benedicte Maurseth performs her 2025 album Mirra. Conceptually, the album centres on the cycle of the year, the activities of the reindeer and other fauna occupying the Hardanger Plateau – the Hardangervidda – the uplands immediately east of Lofthus. This environment is rapidly changing, with habitats becoming constricted. West of Lofthus, across the Sørfjorden is the easily visible Folgefonna ice cap. This is shrinking in area and thickness – so much so that last summer’s skiing season was not possible. Look through Krossvoll’s windows as Maurseth is on stage and there it is, the at-risk Folgefonna.
Maurseth’s compositions for the album intertwine instrumentation and electronics with field recordings of the reindeer and other denizens of the plateau, including the marsh harrier and snowy owl. Her main instrument is the area’s Hardanger fiddle (the hardingfele), a violin with two sets of strings, one on top of the other. The lower set resonates as the upper strings are bowed. She is accompanied by Mats Eilertsen (double bass, electric bass), Morten Qvenild (harmonium, piano and electronics) and Håkon Stene (percussion, vibes and an array of other instruments), all of whom played on Mirra.
Live, Mirra is more intense than its recorded counterpart. It becomes possible to appreciate that the interplay between the musicians is organic, not precisely defined by what’s composed. There are shifts between crackling sections evoking the dark, windswept times of the year and the arrival of spring, summer, warmer weather. For the latter seasonal changes, the tempo picks up and enters Krautrock-adjacent territory not dissimilar to the tougher aspects of Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge. A mind-blower, and on-the-spot reminder of the presence of climate change. (pictured right, The Messiaen Quartet Copenhagen at Ullensvang Church. From left: Malin William-Olsson, Kristoffer Hyldig, Viktor Wennesz, Mathias Beyer-Karlshoj)
Immediately previous to the performance of Mirra, the Messiaen Quartet Copenhagen are tasked with presenting the festival’s opening concert at Ullensvang Church, which has stood on a promontory stabbing into the Sørfjorden since the 13th century. The current layout is largely the result of a 17th-century makeover. It’s immediately clear the quartet (Mathias Beyer-Karlshoj, cello; Kristoffer Hyldig, piano; Viktor Wennesz, clarinet; Malin William-Olsson, violin) is not fully defined by who they take their name from. Here, their final piece is Brahms’ Clarinet Trio..
Before this, at the church, they perform the world premiere of Norway’s Bjørn Morten Christophersen’s MeloMating, a 15-minute composition with a hypnotic, twisting-turning structure evoking the passage of boats navigating conflicting currents. The playing is by turns assertive and pacific. It makes sense to experience MeloMating in a church whose entrance is metres away from a fjord. Christophersen was present for the performance and, indeed, throughout the festival.
As it happens, those playing the festival crop up in varying contexts – on stage, with different musicians or performers – and in audiences. Choose a seat, and there’s a fair possibility it might be alongside another occupied by one of the Messiaen Quartet – three of whom play at a Friday afternoon recital in a salon at the grand mid-17th-century house Skrivargarden, where works by Clara Schumann, Shostakovich, Bent Sørensen, Johan Severin Svendsen and Messiaen are interspersed with readings by the novelist and poet Ruth Lillegraven. The quartet are also at a Saturday afternoon children’s concert dedicated to the story of Marie Curie, as well as on stage during the revue-style Jubilee Concert. Get booked for Hardanger Music Festival, and stretching out is part of the deal. (pictured left, Ruth Lillegraven at Skrivargarden, with The Messiaen Quartet Copenhagen’s reflective Malin William-Olsson)
Likewise, Benedicte Maurseth was on stage at the Jubilee Concert performing Mirra’s “Sommarbirte,” while also playing with accordionist Gabriel Fliflet and vocalist, Kravik lyre and violin player Martin Steinum Brun.
Everyone seems to be everywhere. And that includes the immensely intent audience, who are in for it all. Faces are seen again and again at the three core venues, the Hardangerhallen, Krossvoll and Ullensvang Church, as well as at the intimate shows at the village bakery Fløy and Skrivargarden. This is a remarkably friendly – and user-friendly – festival. There are also concerts for kids of all ages at schools, and at a library and a care home. Open sums it up.
The extraordinary Helsinki Chamber Choir grab attention on multiple occasions, whether on stage in full or in a slimmed-down line-up. Their interpretation of Bente Leiknes Thorsen’s Ler så jeg griner – with its passages of manic laughing – was wild. An obviously thrilled Thorsen gets up on stage after it is performed. (pictured right, The Helsinki Chamber Choir at the Hardangerhallen)
Martin Steinum Brun and his angel voice was also ever-present, a reminder that the festival bills itself as dedicated to a folk music and chamber music. The bleed between what these can mean is made manifest at Ullensvang Church, at what’s billed as Threads of Light, when Brun and the Helsinki Chamber Choir blur the boundaries between folk – or, rather, the traditional – in a billing including Kalevi Aho’s setting of Sufi mystic Rumi’s poems. Mesmerising.
Also never far are the very forceful violinist Ragnhild Hemsing, who plays Hardanger fiddle too, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff and pianist Thormod Rønning Kvam. Hemsing is a more formal player than Bendicte Maurseth and, perhaps, has come to the Hardanger fiddle from a classical/orchestral background rather than through one rooted in folk and the experimental. Her duet with Kvam of Greig's Violin Sonata in G Major, Op. 13 hits hard, while Kvam's concert finale solo performance of Greig's Ballade in G Major Op. 24 – written 150 years ago here in Lofthus – shimmers like a mirage. Both Hemsing and Kvam are as at home in the church as they are on the Hardangerhallen’s large stage. The same applies to Tanja Tetzlaff who, at the Jubilee Concert, seamlessly interlocks with Kvam.
While the second half of the Jubilee Concert's KORK performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony under conductor Holly Choe – with a full-bore woodwind section – is an obvious crowd pleaser, there is also an impression that the combinations of players specially assembled for the festival is in keeping with concurrent challenges to expectations – such as the debut of MeloMating. The first half of the Jubilee Concert sharply contrasted with the second's Beethoven. Friction Forward, composed last year by the festival’s artistic director Therese B. Ulvo, is mechanistic, evoking the gearing propelling a motor. Comfort zones are violated. After this, a sustained ovation. Ulvo beams. (pictured left, Martin Steinum Brun at Ullensvang Church)
There is, though, throughout this glorious and verging-on overwhelming cultural inundation an inherent sensation that reflection is a default setting. It unavoidably suffuses the atmosphere. Obviously, the loss of King Harald is a major contributory factor. It can’t not be. But there is more; intimations that what Grieg found here in the 1870s may soon to be lost – lost forever. In the Hardangerhallen, in Krossvoll, through their windows, with daylight not gone, the Folgefonna is discernible. Up there, somewhere, maybe within the grey cloud and mist capping the peaks are the reindeer, navigating a changing landscape.
Hardanger Music Festival is amazing. Enjoy the music, revel in it. But some of it would not exist without the inspiration taken from a natural environment which is now in danger of being erased.
