Norway
Marina Vaizey
Through the snowy wastes we crunched. The winter scenery was overwhelmingly beautiful and almost devoid of any human habitation: gorgeous mountains in the distance, the black waters of the fjords gleaming, the winter sun shining through the pale blue sky. And lo, here was Andrew Graham-Dixon, in woollen hat and furred windbreaker, to introduce us to centuries of Norwegian art.The first episode of this three-part history focused exclusively on Norway, and was subtitled "The Dark Night of the Soul". What was exceedingly odd about the programme was its melodramatic pessimism, the narration Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Nature, nationalism, folk culture: the broad themes of Norway’s visual arts map easily onto its music. That has given Leif Ove Andsnes and his colleagues plenty of leeway in planning their musical tributes to the painter Nikolai Astrup. For this, their second programme at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (which is hosting the first ever exhibition of Astrup’s work outside Norway, and the first major one worldwide) the three musicians presented a range of surprising facets of the nation’s musical psyche. We heard the folk themes, of course, but classical and even Baroque elements were also explored Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare that a sponsor does more than stump up the money for culture and sometimes request a mention in a review (usually ignored). Last night's godparent, though, the Savings Bank Foundation DNB, is a true self-styled "collaborator", responsible not only for the first major exhibition bringing the remarkable Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup to the world and public-spirited owner of the greatest collection of his paintings and woodcuts, many on display here, but also through its subsidiary Dextra Musica providing the "Kreisler Bergonzi" violin and the Guadagnini violin on loan to the two Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've never thought of myself as a Shostakovich fan, tending to regard what I know of his output as bleak and forbidding. Photographs of the stone-faced composer with the mortuary attendant's demeanour haven't helped.All this changed after a night out with the Oslo Philharmonic under the wizardly baton of Vasily Petrenko, who yields to none in his commitment to Shostakovich's work. Their performance of the composer's Fifth Symphony was a revelation (to me, at any rate) in its heart-stopping leaps between minimalist shivers of strings and catastrophic detonations of brass and percussion, its Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest public painting gallery anywhere with one of the world’s finest collections of Old Masters, has in recent years built up a deserved reputation for bringing to the British audience unfamiliar aspects of well known painters, along with reappraisals and new discoveries. Their latest show is the first-ever exhibition outside of Norway for that country's landscape painter Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928). The son of an ascetic Lutheran pastor, Astrup was sickly even as a child, living in a damp and cold wooden parsonage in a rigorous climate. Often bedridden, the Read more ...
David Nice
Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching onto Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furniture and, in Dostoyevsky's words, "render the supernatural so real that one is almost forced to believe it". But very little seems real or spontaneous in Matthew Warchus's production of The Master Builder. It certainly doesn't help that chilling events from the past or visions of the paranormal are underlined with creepy music and lighting when they should be torn from the characters' insides, the sounds Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
All three Grieg violin sonatas in a single recital may seem like too much of a good thing. The similarities between them outweigh the differences, which are more of quality than intent. But, when heard in chronological order, they provide a fascinating précis of Grieg’s artistic development, from the youthful and cheerfully unsophisticated First, through the terser and more tightly argued Second, to the Third, the composer’s undisputed masterpiece in the genre.Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud (main picture) is clearly a native speaker when it comes to Grieg. Folk music plays different Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Even the most glazed-eyed Europhile must have begun to notice that the EU's righteous halo is dimming a tiny bit. Against a backdrop of currency chaos and uncontrolled immigration, issues of sovereignty and national self-determination are beginning to loom large. This is the aiming point of this new drama series, created by Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbø, though it comes in at a slightly different angle.The setup is that the Norwegian government, led by Prime Minister Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad), has decided – for climate-aware ecological reasons – to cut off the nation's production of oil Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is language a barrier to international recognition? Is English necessary to make waves worldwide? Musicians from the African continent and South America regularly perform in their native tongue beyond the borders of their home countries. But often they are – rightly or wrongly – marketed or pigeon-holed as world music, a branding which allows for eschewing the Anglophone. The always problematic label of world music can be and is debated endlessly, but one thing is certain: for Scandinavia, most internationally successful music is delivered in English.Of course, after setting quirky micro- Read more ...
David Nice
Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ruthlessly as Euripides, Strindberg or Bergman, who was in turn influenced by both of the great Scandinavian playwrights. Something of that pitilessness does emerge in Richard Eyre’s return to the Almeida, chiefly through an unsparing performance by Lydia Leonard and a blend of cold intimacy with powerful nature in Tim Hatley’s designs. The lower depths of pity and terror, though, remain unsounded. Read more ...
David Nice
It’s never funny like Ligeti’s Le grand macabre, though it touches on that joke apocalypse’s more nebulous soundscapes. Nor is it obviously dynamic like David Sawer’s From Morning to Midnight, with which its title is not to be confused (there are no transitional stages here, only birth and death). Wagner’s cosmic sweeps don't entangle the banal with the numinous like this. So what exactly is the new opera Morning and Evening?Of only one thing I’m sure: Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas and Norwegian writer Jon Fosse have created a world, before and after life as we know it, like no other Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s odd seeing the whole of Edward Gardner, as upright as a guardsman until a passionate passage unleashes a repertoire of fierce jabs, deft feints and rapid thrusts. For nine years Gardner's main post was on the podium in the pit of the London Coliseum where all you could see were his disembodied hands and, slowly silvering over the course of his tenure, his schoolboy haircut. It was only at the curtain that he would bound on in a boxy black suit to throw a sweeping arm in the direction of his orchestra.That time is now over. Gardner has left English National Opera and taken up a new Read more ...