Traveling to Oslo with the music travel organization Cimarosa turns out to be not only a musical experience, but also an architectural one.
Our hotel is located in the station district which at the turn of the century was still a dilapidated harbor area, but has now become the iconic architecture district of the city with a host of new cultural facilities: a brand new opera, the bent and gray Munch Museum, 70m high, a huge National Museum with a gem by Renzo Piano nearby where the contemporary art collection of Astrup Fearnley, shipping magnate, is housed. The museum bears his name. Norway must be a wealthy country. Especially since the discovery of oil and gas off the coast. The state owns the exploitation through the company Equinor (formerly Statoil). The government deposits the proceeds in the Norwegian Government Pension Fund and every Norwegian benefits from it. The fund currently contains the staggering sum of 1.516 billion euros. Culture benefits as well and displays it with an overwhelming infrastructure.
Evening with Richard Strauss
We attend our first concert in an older part of the city, in the Konserthus. It is the home base of the Oslo Philharmonic. For many years that orchestra was under the leadership of the famous and late Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons. Tonight it is in the capable hands of the German Marc Albrecht. He was chief conductor at Dutch Opera for ten years before choosing an international career. It is a completely Richard Strauss program, beginning with a short intermezzo called "Träumerei am Kamin", dreams by the fireplace. It lasts barely 5 minutes but sounds so lovely and idyllic that you immediately understand that this intermezzo is more popular than the Strauss opera Intermezzo from which it comes. Nice to hear how you immediately recognize those orchestral turns that we encounter so often in all his works. It is an unpretentious symphonic piece of crescendo and decrescendo, almost complacent, said dramaturg Piet Devolder who traveled with the group as a musical guide.
This was followed by the Horn Concerto No. 2. For this the orchestra had invited the first horn player of the Berliner Philharmoniker as soloist, Stefan Dohr. He played it flawlessly without score, but you can expect that from such a star. Although, Strauss himself, a horn player, composed it for his father - also a horn player - who never played it because he found it too difficult. The second part of that concerto is a "duet" - a gem between hornist and the different sections of the orchestra. A truly virtuoso horn concerto.
Main course of the evening: 22 fragments drawn straight from nature, from sunrise to sunset, brilliantly joined together to form a real Alpine Symphony. Completely in the tradition of his other famous symphonic poems. The day begins soft and light until dark night falls. Strauss musically describes his walk through meadows and forests, gives voice to his feelings and experiences encountered during that journey. You hear danger approaching, it thunders and lightens, the whole orchestra trembles until the storm passes and night falls peacefully again. An ideal story for the Oslo symphony orchestra to show what it has under Marc Albrecht and that is much, deliciously much. And the composer? It seems to me that with the orchestral mastery of Richard Strauss the Alps come into their own better than in the bombastic descriptions that the Austrian Alp expert Anton Bruckner often gives them.
Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen danced
In the opera of Oslo (what a building!) we see a play by Hendrik Ibsen in a ballet version, "The Wild Duck". It is a story about dealing with family secrets, about two families who share a drama of sexual abuse and how they each try to resolve it in their own way. Seeking the truth or continuing to live in the lie. About this play I read somewhere that the truth is too hard to be able to continue with it. The desperate abused woman takes her own life. Dramatic psychological realism, the hallmark of Ibsen's work.
No Peer Gynt music supports this ballet, but contemporary electronics and acoustic trumpet by Norwegian composer Nils Petter Molvaer. Besides saxophonist Jan Garbarek, he is the emblematic figure of the Norwegian jazz scene and known from the famous ECM label. It gave the ballet a wondrous soundscape on which all those supple bodies of the ballet corps could let loose in the choreography of Marit Moum Aune.
French opera with entirely Norwegian cast
"Dialogues des Carmélites" from 1957 by Henri Poulenc is said to be a religious opera. A story about nuns who were slaughtered during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. In the fifties, religion was still prominently present in our societies. Nowadays you would quickly wonder how the self-chosen martyrdom of a group of women from 1794 could be a subject for a compelling opera. Even Poulenc doubted whether an opera without an amorous plot could be a success, but gradually that story grips you because it is about each of us, about making choices and how profound they can be in life. It is one long and at times impressive meditation on fear of death, forcefully supported by the orchestral power of Poulenc's music.
But be careful. We are in Oslo and that does mean a solid opera orchestra conducted by Yi-Chen Lin, (from Taiwan, but raised in Vienna since she was eight) with a completely Norwegian cast. That does pose a problem for a French-sung opera. Yet we hear a couple of beautiful voices: the alto Randi Stene as Madam de Croissy (the dying prioress) and the lyrical soprano Mari Eriksmoen as Blanche. And then there was that delightful choir with a splendid Ave Maria and Ave Verum, but especially that last haunting Salve Regina on the way to the scaffold. A sober staging in the first part, somewhat overacted in the second part. One scene stands head and shoulders above the rest: the death scene of the first prioress, Madame de Croissy. Spine-tingling, it is not only an agony of death, but also a struggle for her faith in God, in total surrender or distressing remorse of conscience? Her Carmelite nuns choose death. They lose their lives, what do you gain then?
- WHAT: Richard Strauss, Träumerei am Kamin, Horn Concerto no. 2, Eine Alpensinfonie. Henrik Ibsen. The Wild Duck, ballet version with music by Nils Petter Molvaer. Henri Poulenc, Dialogues des Carmélites
- WHO: Oslo Symfonie Orkest conducted by Marc Albrecht with Stefan Dohr, horn soloist Norwegian Opera and Ballet Company, ballet director Marit Moum Aune. Norwegian Opera in a production by Barrie Kosky, Norwegian Opera Orchestra conducted by Yi-Chen Lin. With, among others, Mari Erksmoen, soprano - Marita Solberg, soprano - Randi Stene, alto,
- WHERE: Konserthus and Opera of Oslo
- WHEN: respectively 11, 13 and 14 April 2024
- PHOTOS: © Erik Berg, Marco Borggreve, Tore Sætre
