Norway
Sarah Kent
Even before going to art school, Tracey Emin discovered the work of the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. And even though he was born 100 years before her, she embraced him as a kindred spirit. One can see why. Whether painting figures, buildings or landscapes, Munch projects onto his subjects the intense feelings of desolation, loneliness and abandonment which haunted him most of his life.When he was just five, his mother died of TB, his favourite sister following nine years later. Brought up by a neurotic father obsessed with death, he recalled an unhappy childhood in which, “The angels Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Artists’ management Harrison Parrott has started a concert streaming platform called Virtual Circle on emusiclive.com, launched two days ago and only available as a live event - no catch-ups. Watching its debut concert - the Oslo Philharmonic with the much-buzzed-about Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä - it struck me that it must be terribly difficult to film an orchestra effectively. Ah no, responded a friend in the know: it’s actually easy, but you have to go with how the music feels, not what it is doing. I wish someone had told the camera directors of this otherwise admirable Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The term electro-pop has kind of lost its meaning, The Top 20 has, for many years, been full of music created on computers, from Charli XCX to BTS to Clean Bandit. Yet still, as a genre header, it's often used to refer to music that riffs on the sound of the 1980s synthesizer pioneers. The music of Norwegian singer Annie has tended in this direction but her latest album, only her third in two decades, is even more explicitly in this vein. It is a bright, engaging affair, given emotional heft by her trademark melancholia.Annie appeared amidst the millennial focus on the Norwegian city of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ole Bull: Stages of Life Annar Follesø (violin), Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Eun Sun Kim, with Wolfgang Plagge (piano) (2L)Schumann thought that the Norwegian violinist and composer Ole Bull (1810-1880) was as accomplished a player as Paganini, A child prodigy, Bull achieved global fame, one of those 19th century musicians who seemingly knew everybody. Berlioz, Grieg and Rossini were fans, and Bull’s ownership of Bergen’s leading theatre gave Ibsen the chance to start his theatrical career. Bull’s belief that Norwegian folk melodies were as worthy as any in mainstream European art music, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Turnamat is a type of washing machine made by AEG. In the composition titled “Turnamat”, Seventies-type synths, wobbly keyboard lines and hard-grooving drums give way to a brass-led interlude suggesting an acquaintance with the compositions of Lalo Schifrin. It’s as if a jazz-inflected soundtrack from 45 years ago has been shoved into a blender rather than a washing machine, then reconstituted and given a major buff-up. “Turnamat” is by Skarbø Skulekorps, an oddball Norwegian jazz outfit.“Surrender” is as impactful. On this, over just-short of five minutes, the sax player Bendik Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Norwegian singer Solveig Slettahjell has a feeling for slow. Her 2001 debut album was called Slow Motion Orchestra, and in the years since then she has turned her very fine sense of how to convey the essence and the meaning of songs at a very measured pace into her calling card.She has explained what draws her to slowness: “When I slow down the tempo, I can hear the sound in the words, there are so many little details when you play and sing slowly. These little details fascinate me.”In the early days when she was taking on the mantle of Norwegian jazz singers such as her teacher Sidsel Read more ...
graham.rickson
Chopin: Études Sonya Bach (piano) (Rubicon)Chopin’s solo piano études helped push the genre into uncharted territory. He would have practiced examples by Czerny and Clementi in his youth, but his own Op. 10 and Op. 25 sets make far more extreme demands on any pianist. I’m not a keyboard player, and a few minutes’ exposure to the more flamboyant numbers can leave me feeling dizzy. Performing the whole collection in sequence is a tall order, and I’d suggest that listening to them is best done in small doses. Sonya Bach attacks the more extrovert études with a near-reckless abandon. She’s Read more ...
Andsnes, Eriksmoen and friends, Bergen International Festival online review - from Mozart to Widmann
David Nice
This is as close as we’re going to come now to the real festival experience. The enviably well-funded Bergen International Festival is serving up on average three or four events a day, livestreamed from atmospheric venues around the city and all available for a month. For those of us lucky to have witnessed the more intimate strand within the international programme curated by great pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, teaming up this year with outstanding soprano Mari Eriksmoen and young players from the (also well-funded) Crescendo mentoring programme, it was close to teleportation. But whereas fiv Read more ...
David Nice
Could there be more tender, tactful or soul-nourishing signs of a new musical normal than these two 45-minute gems? We're nowhere near emulating the kind of live distance concerts members of the Bergen, Oslo and Czech Philharmonics have been offering for some weeks now, but it's vital to hope that we can at some point in the not too distant future.Especially when the programming has been as thoughtfully done as it has been here, with gravely beautiful openers, the riveting presence of the most compelling of young lyric-dramatic sopranos and the assured, low-key art-concealing-art of Read more ...
David Nice
It seems like a different world when the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle gave a full concert to an empty hall as the world began to go into lockdown. Now, on continental Europe at least, orchestral musician plus the occasional star conductor and soloist(s) are cautiously reuniting in smaller numbers, though still as yet without a live audience. We look on from the UK, behind as we are in possibilities of release from quarantine, but even here there are a few hopeful signs of players being able to do more than join each other virtually from their own homes. Oslo Philharmonic's Read more ...
David Nice
So much pressure is on for Lise Davidsen to be the next Kirsten Flagstad or Birgit Nilsson, but the question has to be asked: is this just The Voice - a big "just" when a dramatic Wagnerian soprano is at stake - or The Complete Artist? Intimations of the latter flashed through much of a well-planned programme - elements of it already featured in her Wigmore Hall debut recital - in partnership with consummate, calm pianism from James Baillieu, but settled in the divine shape of Sibelius's Luonnotar, nature-spirit and sea mother, haloing her in mysterious glory.Though this tone-poem for voice Read more ...
David Nice
"Sadler's Wells! Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?," a cheery bus conductor is alleged to have called out around the time of this towering masterpiece's premiere in 1945. The side of a "Grimes bus" today would probably proclaim over Britten and the work itself the "brand" of two stalwart perfomers - conductor Edward Gardner and leading protagonist Stuart Skelton, dominant forces of the opera over the last ten years.With English National Opera and more recently presenting his Bergen Philharmonic as one of the finest orchestras in the world - last night's concert performance Read more ...