No audience, but these performers still created an amazing atmosphere Bergen Festival Opening Concert
Hardly a day has passed recently without losing another music festival. So the fact that one major European festival has defied the trend and gone ahead – though broadcast only, to empty halls – is a tonic in itself. On Wednesday night, the Bergen International Festival opened with a typically bold concert from the city’s own orchestra.
Like all really good festivals, this one is soaked in the character of the locale. Bergen is a Norwegian sea-port of picture-postcard prettiness. It is outward-looking and cosily insular at once, and the festival is the same, proud of local composer Edvard Grieg, and supportive of local talent, while commissioning new work from composers and theatre directors worldwide.
This year’s festival is no exception. The German Jörg Widmann is the featured composer, and he contributed no less than three pieces to the opening concert, which was mostly broadcast from the main concert hall, the Grieghallen. They included what I believe was a brandnew fanfare to kick off the evening, played by the band of the Norwegian Naval Defense Corps.
In terms of performers, the festival showcase couldn’t field any international talent, apart from the Bergen Philharmonic’s British chief conductor Edward Gardner, who led the opening concert with his usual decisive aplomb. So, the artistic director Anders Beyer decided to make a virtue of necessity, with an opening concert that positively radiated Norwegian national pride.
The queen and crown prince of Norway, the prime minister and the mayor of Bergen all appeared to lend support and talk about the importance of culture at a time of Covid-19 crisis. We heard the charmingly Mendelssohn-like song Ja, vi elsker, sung by groups of singers filmed in misty fjords and sun-filled coasts, all waving national flags. We even had the singer Einar Selvik from the cult alt-folk band Wardruna, looking stirringly shaman-ish in reindeer-skin. He sang some moving verses from a creation myth in Old Norse.
As for the core programme, it was lightweight. Widmann’s 180 Beats per Minute was a Bartók-flavoured minimalist exercise in hectic repeating beats, while his Con Brio was his response to Beethoven, with hints of the Seventh Symphony peeping out from among the modernist rustlings and detonations.
Mozart’s concert aria Ch’io mi scordi – in which the solo parts were rendered with delicate grace by famed Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and soprano Mari Eriksmoen – provided some much-needed ballast, as did Arvo Pärt’s stark Tabula Rasa. Still, this was only the beginning. There are 49 more concerts to go, all freely available via the festival’s website. It’s an amazing achievement.