Norway
Saskia Baron
We’re told from childhood that it’s rude to stare at people, but sometimes it’s hard to extinguish that desire and sitting in a dark cinema can provide the perfect opportunity. If seing Vicky Krieps in Hold Me Tight and Corsage left you craving more screen time with her, More than Ever might just satiate that yen. It’s another chance to allow this fine-featured, body-confident actor to show her emotional range to us watchers in the shadows.Freed from constricting corsetry this time round, Krieps plays Hélène, whose happy life in Bordeaux with her husband Mattheiu (Gaspard Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Carvings is recorded so it sounds as if Juni Habel is adjacent to the listener’s ear. The Norwegian singer-songwriter may as well be inches away. Such intimacy can be disconcerting, especially as Carvings evokes a reflective melancholy. Its eight crepuscular songs evoke twilight and wintertime, when introspection is never far.Habel’s second album is the follow-up to summer 2021’s All Ears. That was a mood piece drawing from influences including Vashti Bunyan and Jessica Pratt. Carvings is less about the atmosphere created but more about the form of the song itself, and rising and falling Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Movie-watchers are wallowing in the back catalogues. I hunted down theartsdesk's readership stats for the film reviews I’d written this year. Top of the list was not a new release at all, but the new extras-loaded Blu-ray version of Bertrand Tavernier’s 'Round Midnight (1986).Which makes me feel slightly less guilty for going back this year again and again to the softest cinematic comfort blanket I know, Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1969). In new films I didn't review, I was entranced by the compelling performance of Renate Reinsve as the woman whose Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The Oslo World organisers are at pains to point out that, despite the name, they are not a “world music” festival. And with good reason, really. There may have been a few familiar WOMAD veterans headlining over the week-long event – Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, Malie's Fatoumata Diawara, the queen of Cuba Omara Portuondo – but the emphasis was emphatically not on any kind of beads-and-bongoes authenticity.Far from it: even in just the three days I was there the culture on offer in venues across Oslo felt more like a trip into a giddy sci-fi vision than the worthy anthropologist’s guide to other Read more ...
David Nice
“What about the communication with the audience?” asked violinist and impresario Bjarte Eike in his First Person piece for theartsdesk. “How can a 'normal' concert be turned into a special event?” Explaining how is one thing – but doing it to dazzle our senses is what counts. Though the Alehouse Session which followed out in the foyer was brilliant business more or less as usual, “Purcell’s Playhouse” took us further on the road of making the old absolutely new.The cue for our entertainment surely came from great Henry himself, purveyor of theatre music for curious hybrids as well as odes and Read more ...
Bjarte Eike
History first. The 17th century London of Oliver Cromwell and its puritanical quest to curb all creativity – banning music, closing down theatres, restricting alcohol and all the rest – provided an incredible backdrop for Barokksolistene’s project The Alehouse Sessions. How music survived with its tunes and tales, in song and dance, has for me been a true revelation.The out-of-work court musicians mingling with the locals at London’s many public drinking houses created a huge amount of wonderful music. Defying prohibition and censorship, human creativity survived with creative people just Read more ...
David Nice
Klaus Mäkelä, 26-year old chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris, lined up for the same role at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2027, knows exactly where he’s going: a crucial asset in the idiosyncratic ebb and flow of orchestral oddities by Sibelius and Strauss. So, too, does pianist Yuja Wang; boundless imagination matched to phenomenal technique made something far more fascinating than usual of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.If you dwell too much on the age of one – yes, I mentioned it just the once – or the fashion sense of the other – she can wear Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Slamming the door on experience comes with repercussions in A Doll's House, Part 2, the thrilling Broadway entry from American writer Lucas Hnath that has arrived at the Donmar as part of an America-friendly season at that address including Marys Seacole (already finished) and The Band's Visit (still to come).In each case, the Covent Garden venue has chosen to take a fresh look at the source rather than bringing over a pre-existing version, which in this case allows for the director James Macdonald to effect his customary wizardry. This veteran of new writing is well-matched to Hnath's Read more ...
David Nice
It could have been the most electrifying week of the musical year. Alas, Heathrow meltdown kept me from two of Klaus Mäkelä’s Sibelius concerts with his Oslo Philharmonic in Hamburg. But there was still what should have been the grand finale, the heavenstorming Fifth Symphony following Mahler and Lise Davidsen in Berg (and more Sibelius). The euphoria I’d experienced in one live Oslo concert and the Sibelius symphonies on Decca was rekindled.An ecstatic if hardly packed Barbican audience obviously agreed. Acoustic differences on a tour are always going to pose problems, and this hall's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Superless are playing live for the first time. Instead of being bottom of a bill, this quartet have a prime spot at Bergen’s Nattjazz festival. Given the eminence of who’s in the band, it makes sense. Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass), Eirik Hegdal (woodwind) and Øyvind Skarbø (drums) are Norwegian and American guitarist Jeff Parker is based in Los Angeles.All four have enviable track records. Amongst the signposts are Håker Flaten’s membership of The Thing, Hegdal’s involvement with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Skarbø’s endless credits and Parker being in Tortoise. Whatever it is Superless are Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
The Innocents made a splash at Cannes in 2021 and it’s easy to see why. The Norwegian supernatural thriller, deftly written and directed by Eskil Vogt (who co-wrote The Worst Person In the World), explores the murky time in childhood when moral boundaries are still being drawn. This deeply creeply but heartfelt film keeps you in its grip, only loosening its hold slightly in the underwhelming final act.It opens with Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) and her family on their way to their new home, a large council estate surrounded by forest. Ida’s sister Anna (Alva Ramstad) is autistic Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There are films that, after seeing the trailer, I very much expect to love. But when the actual movie is disappointing, I find writing the review makes me just a little bit sad. Unfortunately, Wild Men is one of those movies. Billed as a comedy-thriller, it doesn’t quite make the grade on either front, it's not gripping enough as a policier and the jokes often fall flat. Danish director Thomas Daneskov loves Fargo (who doesn’t?) and he’s very much working in a similar setting – small-town cops baffled by incoming crooks. The main outsider is Martin ( Read more ...