Bergen's arts event: A festival that is truly bewitching

Published on Tuesday 1 June 2010 19:03

WHAT a festival they're having in Norway at the moment, and I don't mean that glorification of tat they call the Eurovision Song Contest.

I was a couple of hundred miles away from the media hubbub of Oslo at the weekend, in Bergen, where the city's long-running international arts festival is a breath of fresh air where it's rarely needed – among the spectacular fjords of western Norway.

Where else can you exit a concert at midnight and find the sun still hovering above the horizon, casting its weary glow over a central harbour packed with fishing boats and tall ships and lined with painted wooden houses – a bit like Tobermory on a Viking scale?

And where else does the mid-summer temperature dip so dramatically from a midday swelter to a sharp chill that it can catch out festival first-timers (like yours truly)? This is one of those festivals that are as much about location as content; as much about quirky venues as standard theatres and halls; as much about getting to know your fellow festival-goers and feeling a part of the place, even if its just for a few days.

Bergen has a population of 250,000 and a spinal main street that stretches from a high-set church at one end to the historic Rosencrantz Tower (nothing to do with Hamlet) at the other, just beyond a busy fish market crawling with all sorts of strange edible treasures pulled from the fresh Nordic waters.

Within days, you are on nodding terms with complete strangers, and equally familiar with the sweetness of the local mussels, prawns and sea urchins, such as those sampled in the sensational offshore island setting of the Cornelius restaurant, where the chef deep-sea dives for his own ultra-fresh produce.

Enough, though, of Bergen's beguiling (if outrageously expensive) cuisine; why travel to such an isolated spot for a festival programme that mostly centres on eclectic musical tastes? This year's event takes in rich pickings of folk music, scattered pockets of contemporary classical music and standard orchestral fare, not to mention a coincidental Jazz Festival.

The answer is the same as it would be for, say, the St Magnus Festival or Fife's East Neuk Festival, where events that combine the uniqueness of the location with a uniqueness of presentation serve to tickle the curiosity.

One obvious example in this 58th Bergen Festival programme – whose theme is Fright and Delight and includes a "black metal musical", and a specially commissioned theatrical production Voices by the controversial Catalan director Calixto Bieito – was last weekend's brand new production of a tragic opera, Anne Pedersdotter, which has direct links with Bergen, and has hardly ever been performed since its original Oslo premiere in 1971.

Written by the eccentric Norwegian composer Edvard Fliflet Brin, the opera's heroine was a true-to-life figure among 16th-century Bergen high society, at a time when the city, like the rest of Europe, was engaged in gruesome witch trials. At the age of 22, Anne married a widowed priest more than twice her age, whose stepson she promptly fell in love with. Spurned by the local community, and accused of "cursing" her elderly husband to death, she was condemned as a witch.

This new festival production was set in the open-air parade ground of the old Bergen fortress, where much of the real Anne's life would have been played out. Marte Moen Danielsen's simple gauze-covered twin-storey design worked brilliantly as a stage outcrop from the actual Rosencrantz Tower, and the re-orchestration of Fliflet Brin's score for military band (amplified from a side canopy by the excellent Norwegian Armed Forces Band under Peter Szilvay's suitably militaristic baton) gave the music enough edge to carry its message over the passing birds, planes and motorbikes.

To be honest, Fliflet Brin's music is something of a hotch-potch. But then, so was he. He was a reputable drunk, and the completion of the score for its original premiere – some five years before his early death at 52 – was touch and go as he failed to meet successive deadlines. "He would do silly things like stumble into graveyards, fall asleep, get arrested and fail to make it to the theatre next day," recalls the Bergen Festival's own colourful director, Per Boye Hansen.

Yet there is something bold and refreshing about a score that flits freely between melodramatic austerity reminiscent of an Eisenstein movie soundtrack (characterised by unmistakable shades of Shostakovich, Hindemith and Weill), and moments of deep-seated Romanticism that give Wagnerian weight to the sung line and its pulsating underscore. One such Wagnerian moment was enhanced on Friday by the ghostly appearance beyond the castle backdrop of a tall ship gliding silently into Bergen Harbour – a magical effect, perfectly timed, that no amount of deliberate planning could ever have achieved.

On the other hand, the casting of Swedish soprano Ingela Brimberg was no accident. Her powerful performance in the title role – absorbing and emotive – served to fire up gutsy support around her, from Tomas Lind's passionate Martin (the stepson) to Kari Hamny's wholesome ranting as the accusatory mother-in-law Marete and a host of other rock solid portrayals.

I cannot imagine Anne Pedersdotter, as a mongrel hybrid of its time, working in any other context than this, where historical and locational relevance played their parts to perfection. Neither is it of a calibre that repeated annual performances would draw pilgrims as Wagner's operas do to Bayreuth, or the Passion Play does to Oberammergau.

But together with a 200th anniversary exhibition of the priceless violin collection of "Norway's Paganini", Ole Bull (including the famous Guarneri del Ges), and daily concerts in the beautiful Troldhaugen villa of Bergen's most famous son, Edvard Grieg, it was just one of several good reasons to take in a festival that does what most successful events of their kind do: express local specialities within a worldly context.

Boye Hansen's theme next year will be Family and Trauma, and features a new production of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, complete with expanded prologue in Norwegian. It's cheeky twists like that which make the journey worthwhile.

&#149 Bergen Festival information on www.fib.no/en/