Andsnes, Astrup and other Norwegians

Had my Arts Desk say on the first of two programmes given by Leif Ove Andsnes (pictured above overlooked by Gainsborough ladies) and two young Norwegian musicians at the Dulwich Picture Gallery; handed over to Gavin Dixon for the second, and he did an excellent job (which means I agree with him). But I couldn't resist going back for the daytime recital, partly because I'd fallen in love with that amazing gallery again and wanted to sit with Soane's provision for natural light from above having its full effect.

On the first evening, I sat myself right alongside Van Dyck's Samson and Delilah, one of my favourite pictures in the gallery along with the three Rembrandts and a Claude.

Tuesday lunchtime was a chance to sit on the other side, so not looking towards the male nudes as in this photo of violinist Guro Kleven Hagen,

but in the opposite direction, with a whole other clutch of pictures around me. Hearing both programmes gave the opportunity to appreciate the perfect symmetries of the programming, made by Andsnes in conjunction with the cultural wing of the Savings Bank Foundation DNB - a very enlightened collaboration responsible for both the majority of the Nikolai Astrup paintings in the current exhibition and the valuable instruments on loan to Hagen and viola player Eiving Holtsmark Ringstad.

The highlight of the second concert, for me, was Ringstad's performance with Andsnes of Sinding's Suite in the Old Style: the first movement a virtual moto perpetuo in which Ringstad dropped no stitch and made musical sense of virtuosity, the second a chance to return to the dark brooding to which the viola is so suited. Diffident in person, Ringstad comes alive as a performer, a good foil to the more reserved musicianship of Hagen. As for Andsnes' inclusion of four of Grieg's many Lyric Pieces, I ordered up the disc of his performances recorded on Grieg's Steinway in the house at Troldhaugen (a pairing of man and piano which, of course, I was uniquely privileged to experience for myself in the realms of Kurtág and Liszt during last summer's trip to Bergen).

Delighted as I was to receive these photos from Dulwich Picture Gallery's press department a week after the event, I felt just a bit miffed that they hadn't taken up my suggestion to photograph the three musicians in the Astrup exhibition's final room of midsummer bonfires. The best I can do is an illicit picture of the crowds in that room - like the Norwegians, I was amazed to see so many of Astrup's flaming canvases gathered together in one space, and there were no postcards of this splendid group.

Many of these pictures I saw for the first time last summer in one of Bergen's superb KODE galleries, in a new wing specially devoted to the master; mostly denuded in the cause of the Dulwich exhibition, the biggest of Astrup's work to be shown anywhere in the world, it currently has a special display devoted to the artist's early works.

What most struck me then and, in much more detail now, was the special quality of Astrup's woodcuts. Like Munch, who bought several of his early works, Astrup proved something of a pioneer here - in fact, more so. He not only painted on his wood blocks, but also on the finished prints. He writes almost self-reproachfully about his 'experimentation', continuing:

I work in my own way, and several of my impressions can appear to be more paintings than woodcuts and this is, of course, really a fault - that is also why I have not considered exhibiting them. Some of them also require a lot of work to print, as I use 5-6 blocks for each impression.

He chose his paper carefully, linking it to his environment - he liked the Kazo of inspirational Japanese example, long-fibred stuff from the paper mulberry tree - and alder was the preferred tree for his blocks, though he also used pear and pinewood.

The Dulwich exhibition gives in some instances four different versions of the same scene, infinitely sensitive to the tones and changing seasons of the small area above Bergen where Astrup worked and lived for most of his life. In a rare move to please a patron fond of the marsh marigolds which feature in some of his most famous images, he reworked Night Ploughing, c.1905

to include the plant in 1927 where the water had been.

An assemblage of no less than four woodcuts of The Moon in May, 1908, which I can only suggest in their entirety from two pages of the excellent catalogue

range from an idyllic scene with two people working in the garden

to what looks like a snowy landscape with a very thick application of paint.

As for the joyous midsummer bonfire images, one famous oil with lovers, dancers and fiddler

exists both as colour woodcut in several versions

and in black-and-white, making the fiddler look like Old Nick - after all, Astrup's pastor father thought these rituals were the work of the devil.

You can see why these images are a source of no small fascination, and I'll certainly return to Dulwich before the exhibition ends on 15 May (if you want to see it after that you'll have to travel to Norway or Germany).

What ought to be more than a footnote but which finds itself squeezed in here by virtue of its link to an unusual concert in a special place has to be the second of the Waterloo Warehouse concerts organised and conducted by the ever-enterprising Jonathan Bloxham (all donations, as before to MOAS, Migrant Offshore Aid Station - and as I promised I gave all savings on Christmas cards and stamps to them as well, though a little miffed not to have had the barest acknowledgment. Anyway the transfer went through). I'm being totally honest when I say that Ben Baker's interpretation of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the orchestra of students and young professionals was the most arresting I've ever heard. Here he is with Jonathan after the performance.

Told an exhausted J he might be able to doze at some point during the Beethoven - I often do, if only mentally - but he had cause to reproach me jovially for never at any point being able to do so. Jonathan paced the central movement just right - more a stately dance than a bland wallow - and Ben, peerless in musicianship and intonation as ever, chose the fiendish cadenzas adapted by Christian Tetzlaff from the version Beethoven made for piano and orchestra, celebrated for having timps to dialogue with the soloist at one point.

The Brahms One which followed was way too big for the modest surroundings, but a flexible and impassioned interpretation with real extra dynamism in the finale, where you noticed all the more how the themes just keep pouring out of Brahms in highest inspiration. This was just as fascinating an approach in its way as Ticciati's with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Jonathan tells me he is up for the post of assistant conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he deserves to get it.

Bergen curators

Norway, Denmark, marriage, Sicily: these are my excuses for slim pickings on the blog for the past few weeks, and I've got a lot to catch up on. All three places yielded the most wonderful times, but maybe my happiest memories in terms of meeting new people who seemed just as interested in me as I was in them (Danes not great in that respect, or maybe it's a politeness thing) have come from the trip to Bergen.

You'll probably recognise the open, friendly face up top: it belongs to Leif Ove Andsnes, who met me in the cafe of one of the four galleries by the central lake, Lille Lungegårdsvann, and who curated two concert specials I'll never forget (Sibelius melodramas plus in an old masonic hall, Kurtág and Liszt in Grieg's villa at Troldhaugen, with the composer's own Steinway as centrepiece: read all about them on The Arts Desk). The ladies in the middle are curator of the Ole Bull House-Museum on Lysøen island Berit Hogheim and the most comprehensive, disciplined and enthusiastic of guides there, Inger Carter. And below them is Sigurd Sandmo, whose titles are Director of the Composers' Homes (around Bergen) and Director of the International Edvard Grieg Piano Competition, standing on the roof terrace at Troldhaugen.

All four are Bergen trained or raised and gave me the greatest insights into this wonderful town, cut off from inland Norway until the late 1980s (I think there was a road from Oslo before then, but that was it). Indeed, the tendency before that was to be closer to England and Scotland over the seas than to the heart of the homeland, to which there were no passable roads before the big changes came.

I owe most in terms of extending the information to Lysøen (Kieron Tyler, it turned out, had got there before me on his trip to Bergen's Jazzfest). Ole Bull has to be one of the most fascinating figures in the history of music: probably because his music died with him, all bar a few pieces he composed for the violin, and he hailed from before the era of the gramophone, only Norwegians really know him as an heroic figure. Clearly a showman too, but a true democrat who never forgot the people to whom he should really be playing.

I want to read a biography of the great man, but Inger certainly gave us some choice details. Bull Senior ran the Swan pharmacy in Bergen, founded in 1595 (I'm told the swan sign is still there, but didn't have enough time to seek out the shop). In 1818 at the age of 8, talented young Ole auditioned for what would in time become the Bergen Philharmonic, becoming its leader at the age of 10 (I think I've got this right, if that's what Inger meant by 'first violinist'). He picked up his love of folk music playing with the locals on his grandmother's farm, and skived off school to play with the "slustril" folk (=sour milk, regarded as low-graders in Bergen society). In 1851 he co-founded the first native-language theatre in Norway and the following year engaged 23 year old Henrik Ibsen as artistic director. On the site now stands a grandiose 1911 building with a bug-eyed statue of Ibsen outside.

Bull's violinistic prowess was compared to Paganini's, but alas he left no recordings and his fame, internationally at least, ended with his death. A handsome fellow, he caused the ladies to faint in recitals and carried a bottle of smelling salts (here in a glass case) to revive them.

His travels and success abroad became so legendary that Ibsen modelled, at least in part (and I hope only in part, because though he was quite a philanderer, Bull seems to have been something of a Mensch), the character of Peer Gynt on him. Peer's travels in Egypt coincide with the fact that Bull climbed the Cheops pyramid in Giza and played his famous folk variations on top. Wish there was a photo of that. In America he set up an (ultimately unsuccessful) Norwegian farmers' colony in Potter's County. His second wife, after an unsuccessful first marriage to a genteel Frenchwomen he'd met in Paris while studying with Vuillaume, was Sara Thorp, a senator's daughter (he was 60, she 20). And then, with daughter Olea in tow, they came to settle on Lysøen.

He bought the entire, 12 km long island. A farm had been there since 1670, but a new home was needed and in collaboration with the architect Conrad Fredrik van der Lippe, he designed a 'mini Alhambra' with a Russian onion dome and stars of David, Indian suns and Arabic symbols woven into the main room's fabric.You can see at least two of them here.

30 local carpenters worked on the project using wood from the island. The Bull family took up residence in the summer of 1873. Eight years later he returned, ill and exhausted from yet another American tour, to die in the Villa Lysø. Sara, a talented musician, played the Mozart Requiem on the piano - his own invention, a piano that would not need tuning, needed tuning after two months, but there was no possibility for that so it was converted into a large piece of furniture - and he died clutching his favourite flora (and Norway's national symbol), a bunch of heather. The house remembers this in its various arrangements.

Ole's granddaughter Sylvea kept the house on, visiting regularly from the States, and in 1974 she turned it over to the Bergen division of the Norwegian Society for the Protection of Ancient Monuments. Though the main room - a splendid concert hall where, alas, I wasn't in time to catch a recital -  and an annex museum room are all there is to see, that's quite an 'all'. Many of his splendid violins are here, including a Guarneri, and his Amati turned up recently, to be given an inaugural recital. The silk flag from New York mixing the Norwegian design with the stars and stripes was his most treasured memento.

My own time on Lysøen was very special indeed, thanks to the convivial company of Inger and Berit, who took me off to the bijou cafe for waffles and coffee before I took a walk round the back of the house

up to the island's highest point

and back through verdant woods and a silent lake to the villa.

Then we returned to the fun ferry steered by a retired Norwegian navy man, saw the house shining on the island from the mainland docking point at Buena Kai

and drove back to Bergen. I had just enough time to buy more fresh fish at the harbour before a revelatory concert in the wonderful old Håkonshalle of the castle given by the young Norwegian string group Ensemble Allegria and the phenomenal Lawrence Power (both concert photos by Thore Brødreskift).

And then, with a rainbow appearing over Bergen harbour, it was into  another taxi to Troldhaugen for my own private tour of the grounds with Sigurd before the 10.30pm concert (which I've written more about over on The Arts Desk). This is the villa c.10pm, and the distant mountain outlines could still be seen against red in the sky through its windows nearly two hours later

Would love to have heard a recital in the new concert hall too, with its view down to Grieg's composing hut and the lake

which we then went to see via the oddly Mycenean tomb

on which Edvard's and Nina's names are carved in quasi-runic letters

but 40 of us in the house was something unique and unrepeatable. Here's my own shot of Grieg's piano before the recital began.

Bergen's in-town museums are splendid, too. I met Leif Ove in the cafe of KODE 2, but I'd spent hours in 3 and 4. 3 has the superlative collection of Rasmus Meyer to complement its own Munch collection, second only to the one in Oslo. The artist was prolific but never less than a true original; I was fascinated by the self-portrait he painted while in a classy asylum - from this time onward his paintings became more optimistic and colourful - but sadly no postcard was to be obtained. Good old Wikimedia, then.

Which other Norwegian artists impressed? Harriet Backer, certainly, in just a couple of pics from a whole wall of her stuff - still all those domestic scenes about which Munch complained, but this is rather lovely -

and a new wing devoted to Nikolai Astrup, sometimes too gaudy and sentimental, but a good chronicler of Norwegian happy days.

I love the woodcuts especially - there was a wall of Beltane fires in oils, but not I think anything like this:

And the reproduction doesn't quite catch the uncanny light of 'Clear June Night'.

There's a big Astrup exhibition coming to the UK in 2016. I think you'll be rather impressed if you don't know his work.

In between the various KODE buidings on the city's inner lake

is the Kunsthalle, and this was hosting the festival's main exhibition, about which I wanted to write on TAD but didn't have the space. Featured artist Ane Hjort Guttu's new body of work, and let's use the words of the blurb, investigates 'issues of power, freedom, the role and responsibility of the artist as well as the possibilities and limitations of political art'. All these are well distilled in her 46 minute film Time Passes. A timely piece of work given the current Norwegian debate on the prohibition of begging on the city streets and the question of the (very large) number of Romanian Roma folk. The earnest and ever so slightly humorless art student Damla (played by actress Damla Kilickiran) takes up a place near Bergen's station with an articulate and touching Roma woman whose thoughts are duly given as she sits in the public library.

Damla starts out 'sitting' as an artwork for her studies at the college, but withdraws as she becomes more troubled about its possibly exploitative value. The film itself is not without lightness of touch - I love the students' discussion about Breughel's Landscape with Icarus and how Auden sees it in 'Musée des Beaux Arts' (very germane to the film's subject: ordinary life goes on alongside immense suffering).

We last see Damla at her friends' graduation exhibition, in a space which mirrors the one we're sitting in (I'm pleased with this picture, but I wish I'd caught a good frame from the film, too, though it's just possible it might be the last scene so the room within a room would be appropriate).

Time Passes is also a hymn to Bergen, for all the problems of everyday life, and Leif Ove celebrated it, too, in his interview narrative of his early days here. I didn't have a chance to reproduce much of what I transcribed on TAD, so this seems like a good place for it. 

There was a Czech teacher at the Bergen Music Conservatory, Mr [Jiří] Hlinka, whom I got to hear about. I came as a 15 year old and had some private lessons from him, and he said you should come over next year and start at the conservatory. So I did, and he was a very important inspiration to me. I was a rather shy, introverted boy from a provincial island, I didn’t have professional musicians around me, I needed someone to show me the passion and commitment and life of music, someone every day telling me the importance of contrasts in the music, the storytelling, showing me all the possibilities. It had such an impact on me and made me realize I couldn’t do without music. He was into the Russian school, whatever that actually means, maybe there is a system at least for children, or the sense of movement at the keyboard. But anyway he had played for Gilels and even once for Richter, who was also my idol in the first years. Later on I changed my tastes and came to know Lipatti, Michelangeli and many others, and became much more diverse, but first I was crazy about Richter.

Bergen was important because I’d never heard a professional orchestra – well, as a 14 year old I played with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and the Mozart D minor Piano Concerto was my first experience of hearing these sounds. But then I came here and first concert I went to had Mahler One in the second half, and I was blown away, I thought is this what an orchestra can do? Simply to come and hear it and get those impulses, getting to love the orchestra, getting to love chamber music, because in my first year at conservatoire I played with a viola-player, a mezzo-soprano, and I loved that and used as much time on that as my solo studies, almost. It was a tiny conservatoire, under 50 students, and the quality was up and down, but I had a great teacher, I was so dedicated, as a piano student music was the only thing in life for me during the first few years

The festival was a very important inspiration. In 1987 students could sign up as volunteer ushers, which meant you got a free seat. I look at the programme for that year now, and there was so much going on, so many singers - Lucia Popp, Katia Ricciarelli, Teresa Berganza; in the Håkonsaal [pictured below with the Borodin Quartet] they had a great singer every night. 

Four or five song recitals also blew me away. That was so exciting, we felt that the world came to our little town. Now it's not quite as unique in Norway as it was then, it really was the national event. It still holds that position, it's still the biggest arts festival in the Nordic countries, I think. But then it made such an impression. It remains a bit of a fairytale for me.

And 'fairytale' is exactly what his two concerts with friends young and contemporary - Sibelius's magic mix of spoken poetry and instrumental magic, Kurtág's kaleidoscope of quasi-naive fantasies with Liszt's sighs and swoons - will always remain for me. But what we still need to explore are the mountains and glaciers inland. I caught only a glimpse of them on the flight back.