CPO’S NORDIC NIGHT A CAPTIVATING EVENING
Scandinavian music and dance bring welcome winter warmth
Following its Christmas break, the CPO returned to its winter concert schedule with a single evening of music entitled Nordic Greats. Focusing on music from Scandinavia, especially the music of conductor Rune Bergmann’s home country of Norway, the program drew one of the largest audiences of the season, an audience that seemed spellbound throughout the evening.
There were, I think, two reasons why this was so. The first was the presence of Eldbjorg Hemsing, a young Norwegian violinist, who performed the North American premiere of an unknown violin concerto by Hjalmar Borgstrom, a Norwegian composer whose music had been almost entirely forgotten.
Playing with remarkable lyricism and eloquence, Hemsing was the perfect advocate for this concerto, a work of late-romanticism tinged, here and there, with the harmonic colour of the era of Richard Strauss and Debussy. The work itself is quite attractive in its thematic material, if rather episodic in structure. It sounded more like a symphonic poem for violin and orchestra than a typical concerto — although there was no program to go with the music.
Hemsing’s recent CD of the concerto sold like hot cakes at intermission and she was available to meet the audience and to sign copies of her disc. Her playing is not, on the surface, that of a barnstorming virtuoso. Rather, she presents herself in a quiet, restrained manner, one that throws the focus of the performance on the instrument itself and to the exquisite sounds she is able to draw, quite effortlessly, from the violin.
While the music she played was concert music, she came across as a type of traditional or folk musician — but a folk musician with first-class technique and tone. The audience was completely captivated, her simple eloquence winning over everyone who heard her.
The second obvious reason for the success of the evening was the presence of the dance component in the performance of Grieg’s Peer Gynt music. Because of its familiarity, it is easy to forget just how good Grieg’s music is, and as a musical performance the CPO and Bergman definitely stepped up to the plate.
The folk rhythms were sharply characterized, but not overdone, and the languid inner melancholy of the slow numbers contained a remarkable beauty of sound. Bravo to the violin section here.
This musical excellence was made still more striking by the dancers. Fundamentally, the dance component consisted of abstract modern dance choreography that responded to the inner mood of the music but largely did not engage the Peer Gynt story itself. This was probably a good idea, since the play is, to say the least, complex. What was presented by choreographer Yukichi Hattori and his troupe of adult and child dancers was a series of dance vignettes that engaged the varying moods of the short musical numbers.
The only obvious connection to the Peer Gynt story came in the final, most famous number from the score, In the Hall of the Mountain King. To this wellknown number, the dancers engaged not only the stage but the paths leading to the stage in a pantomime of the various unearthly creatures that inhabit the troll world of the play. Much of the dancing had a ballet element to it, even as many of the moves were in the realm of modern dance.
The sense of a delicate imagination was to be felt everywhere, and whether it was the fragrance of early romantic love or the different aspects of nature, the dances fit wonderfully with the music, the performers themselves demonstrating a high technical standard.
The evening opened with a vigorous account of Sibelius’s Finlandia and some baroque music by the Swedish composer Johan Helmich Roman, the latter performed by a reduced group of strings. At the end there was a nod in the direction of Norwegian traditional music, as Hemsing returned to play (from the balcony) what appeared to be some music from the Hardinger fiddle tradition, a distinctive reference to rural Norway and an emblem of its folk past.
And together with conducting the orchestra in an efficient, capable manner, conductor
Rune Bergmann offered a short number in traditional Norwegian style played on what appeared to be a bukkehorn — an instrument made from a goat horn and played in the manner of a folk trumpet. Almost unearthly in its sound, the free-sounding folk music evoked a time and place different from our modern, urban world.
Altogether, the evening brought into focus the musical traditions of Europe’s northern countries, a region bathed in snow in winter, much like Canada. Despite the physical and historical distance between Scandinavia and Canada, it was possible to sense an affinity between the two areas through geography. This was one of the most successful concerts of the CPO’S season thus far.