Risør Report -- part three

Home for a few hours today after flying back from Copenhagen last night and a couple of days with our dear friends in Malmö, Sweden, Birdie and Marc and their wonder children Isaac and Inez and heading back to O'Hare in a few hours to fly to a wedding weekend in Richmond, Virginia, so time to fill in some more highlights from the world's most jam-packed chamber music festival!

Last year, the Festival sponsored an outdoor evening concert (remember that evenings are illuminated like late afternoons here) on the picnic island of Stangholmen (above, at a later evening hour), a short boat ride away from Risør.  It was such a huge hit that the Festival organizers not only decided to make it an annual feature, they also went about building a permanent outdoor stage for the island that can be used for all sorts of concerts and the many other festivals held in the town (including those of wooden boats and, we kid you not, bluegrass music).  

Securing $2.5 million Norwegian kroner (crowns), about $500,000 U.S., from the recently established DnB NOR Savings Banks Foundation, Festival Director Turid Birkeland, a firecracker former Minister of Culture in Norway, and her colleagues got the thing designed, built, and up and running just in time for Friday night's 9 p.m. show after dealing with town debates over Plexiglas versus wood (wood won), weather delays, and resulting cost increases.  I'll get some pictures up here of the crowd of 100s of (silent as ever here) listeners in the natural bowl facing down to the stage to take in, among others, Andsnes and Tetzlaff, trumpeters Håkan Hardenberger and Mark Bennett, the Norwegian Soloists choir, and, for dessert, Thomas Quasthoff singing Schubert songs with Marc-André Hamelin at the piano.  "Im Frühling" never sounded, felt, or looked quite like this!

Saturday's concerts started at 12 noon, but first we took in a delightful presentation at the local Baptist Church from a marvelously deadpan curator of several centuries of music boxes on loan for the Festival from the Vest-Agder region Fylkeskommune Museum in Mandal. The noon concert turned around collage, with the Scherzo from that one-man German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters's Merz-based Ursonate (1921-1932). The connection with Norway -- as well as the music -- is direct here as Schwitters (left, chanting) was a refugee there from 1937 to the early 1940s (even building a Merzbau in Lysaker and a half a Merzbau on the island of Hjertoya).  Eir Inderhaug intoned the syllables with appropriate Merz-ness.  Hardenberger was the consummate soloist/interpreter for the trumpet version of Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre and if Tetzlaff should exhibit any technical difficulties in upcoming months, blame it on his definitive and impossibly motoric animation of Antheil's almost-never played 1923 First Violin Sonata with Hamelin as his similarly charged piano partner.  Once again, the uniqueness of not only hearing this repertoire at all but of hearing it by some of the greatest musicians in the world cannot be overemphasized.

That concert went on with Hindemith's Kammermusik No. 1 of 1924 but again we're trying to hold ourselves to the highest if the highlights.  An early evening Haydn survey included two horn piano trios and the Nelson Mass but also the corresponding recitative and aria The Battle of the Nile of 1800 to a text by Nelson's lover, Lady Hamilton.  Eir Inderhaug (above left), spectacular again, with Andsnes at the piano treating this as he would one of Haydn's best sonatas.  The concert opened with Ligeti's 1961 Three Bagatelles for David Tudor.  Let's just say here that it needs to be seen and Hamelin is the one to see it with.

The Saturday evening concert is always held at 10 p.m., in part as a warm up for the Saturday midnight concert! Neglected Hungarian composer György Ránki's 1961 Don Quijote y Dulcinea for oboe (Christian Wetzel) and haropsichord (Allan Rasmussen) was the pleasing curtain-raiser.  Having mentioned Quasthoff's Festival debut at the island concert last night, you can probably guess where this is going. Ravel's career-closing 1932-33 Don Quichotte à Dulcinée with Andsnes at the piano gave Festival goers an intimate experience with the German baritone and his ability to set a mood almost immediately.  But it was Ligeti's 1982 horn trio with the superb Bruno Schneider in collaboration with Tetzlaff and Fredrik Ullén that took us to the next level and the 1864 Op. 32 Songs of Brahms again with Quasthoff and Andsnes that carried us to the witching hour.  I'll have more to say about Quasthoff later but even those who have been captivated by his DG recording of these pieces with his frequent piano partner Justus Zeyen were hardly prepared for the power of his interpretations, pairing with Andsnes, and the fading light outside "our" tiny wooden church. 

The midnight concert is always a favorite both for its programming and its very existence and this year's was no exception -- without intermission or applause between the works we heard one after the other, Ives's 1906 The Unanswered Question with Hardenberger rising silently out of raised carved pulpit; Ligeti's ethereal 1966 Lux aeterna with the Norwegian Soloists; two sections, one of them brand-new, from an evolving work of miniatures, Schattenlinie, by the superb Danish compositional craftsman Bent Sørensen (left), the 2005 Festival composer, with Fredrik Fors's pure clarinet and the work's dedicatees Tomter and Andsnes; the spectral wonders of Dane Per Nørgård's 1974 Rilke setting Singe die Gärten with the Norwegian Soloists and instrumental chamber ensemble; and, icing on the cake, Hardenberger in Haydn's 1796 E Major Trumpet Concerto to send us hopping out into the night, knowing that sunrise was only two hours away.