1-2-3 Engegård Quartet! Norwegian ensemble celebrates 20 years at its own festival in Oslo

The Engegård Quartet has been playing together for 20 years and this year its 1-2-3 Festival in Norway celebrates its 10th anniversary. For this double celebration, the quartet is presenting 1-2-3 Engegård Quartet! at Sentralen in Oslo from 14 to 16 November 2025. The festival features some of the most important works from the quartet's repertoire in the last 20 years along with important collaborators. I chatted to members of the quartet back in 2020, see my interview.

The festival begins with Grieg and Schumann's Piano Quintet with a new work by Nils Økland, and they will be joined by former members of the quartet for a performance of Mendelssohn's Octet, whilst actress Gjertrud Jynge joins them for an evening based on Jon Fosse's Septology combining powerful texts with music from Bach to Kurtag to Norwegian folk. And the weekend ends with a concert combining Ibsen with Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. The quartet will also be celebrating the completion of their recordings of all of Mozart's 26 quartets on Lawo Classics. Full detail of the festival from the website.

In the UK, the quartet will be at the Roman River Festival in Essex in September [further details], opening the festival's 25th anniversary season with a concert of Grieg, Mozart and Norwegian folk music. And the quartet is also in Hereford the same month with Grieg, Boyce and Beethoven [    ]

1-2-3 Mendelssohn: the Engegård Quartet and friends celebrate the music of Felix and Fanny at their festival in Oslo

If you fancy an Autumn weekend in Norway, then the Engegård Quartet is offering a deep dive into the chamber music and songs of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.

The Engegård Quartet [whom we heard recently at Conway Hall, see my review] has a tradition of holding single-composer mini-festivals in its home town of Oslo in Norway and this year, the festival is devoted to the Mendelssohns, Felix and Fanny. 1-2-3 Mendelssohn takes place at Nynorskens hus in Oslo from 8 to 10 November. The Engegård Quartet will be joined by an array of friends including the Elias String Quartet, mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland, pianist Ariel Lanyi, film maker Sheila Hayman, The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s Boys Choir and Nordberg String Orchestra, for a weekend of events focusing on the music of the two composers.

The opening concert features chamber music and lieder, including Fanny's masterpiece, Piano Trio in D minor and Felix's String Quintet No. 1, plus a piano duet version of the famous Wedding March. Saturday begins with a cafe concert devoted to songs without words, then in the afternoon it is the music both wrote in childhood including a performance of one of Felix's early string symphonies performed by young people and both quartets in Felix's Octet. And youth has it in the evening as the boys choir is joined by young people from Barratt Due Junior Ensemble with works including Hear my prayer and the cantata Verleih uns frieden.

Sunday morning sees music by both siblings performed by young people and woven into a story about Felix and Fanny. There is an afternoon salon concert featuring chamber music and songs, then the Norwegian premiere of Sheila Hayman's film Fanny: The Other Mendlessohn, and the festival closes with another feast of chamber music and song, including Ariel Lanyi in Felix's Fantasie in F sharp minor and the event concludes with the audience being invited to join in Hark the Herald Angels Sing! which has music adapted from Mendelssohn's Gutenberg Cantata.

Full details from the festival website.

And looking further ahead, if you fancy a December trip to Oslo, then the Engegård Quartet is collaborating with actress Gjertrud Jynge and visual artist Marianne Heske for A Shining Darkness at Norwegian Opera. This is a stage adaptation, by Gjertrud Jynge, of Jon Fosse's novel Septology which will feature chamber music ranging from old to modern and from popular to sacred, and a video painting by visual artist Marianne Heske visually accompanies the performance.

Details from Norwegian Opera's website.

Attention must be paid: the Engegård Quartet at Conway Hall in Mozart, Bartok, Maja Ratkje, and Fanny Mendelssohn

Fanny Hensel (Mendelssohn) in 1842

Mozart, Bartok, Maja Ratkje, Fanny Mendelssohn; Engegård Quartet; Conway Hall
Reviewed 21 April 2024

Playing of extraordinary vividness and presence by the Norwegian ensemble in a programme moving from Mozart and Fanny Mendelssohn to Bartok and contemporary Norwegian compose Maja Ratkje

The Engegård Quartet (Arvid Engegård, Laura Custodio Sabas, Juliet Jopling, Jan Clemens Carlsen) was at Conway Hall on Sunday 21 April 2024 as part of a UK tour which sees the quartet giving the BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert on 26 April from LSO St Luke's. 

At Conway Hall, the Norwegian ensemble played a programme that began with Mozart's Quartet No.22 in B♭ "Prussian" K.589 followed by Bartok's Quartet No.3 Sz.85, then A Tale of Lead and Light by contemporary Norwegian composer Maja Ratkje and finally Fanny Mendelssohn's Quartet in E flat. Before the concert, I gave a talk Three Contrasting Composers, exploring Fanny Mendelssohn, Bartok and Maja Ratkje and the background to their works.

Sea Songs: Brighton Philharmonic in Geirr Tveitt's Hardanger fiddle concerto and other delights

Ragnhild Hemsing and Hardanger fiddle (Photo: Nikolaj Lund)

On Sunday, 7 April 2024, Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra's season finale at the Dome in Brighton features dynamic young conductor Adam Hickox in Sea Songs. Yes, the programme does begin with Britten's Four Sea Interludes from 'Peter Grimes' and ends with Debussy's La Mer (written just down the coast in Eastbourne!), but the real meat is in between these. Ragnhild Hemsing is the Hardanger fiddle soloist in Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt's Concerto No. 2 Three Fjords, whilst Joanna Macgregor is the piano soloist in music by the great Japanese film composer, record producer and actor Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died last year.

The hardanger fiddle is Norway's national instrument; it probably originated in the 17th century s a hybrid of earlier folk fiddles and the viola d’amore. Its tone is smaller than the violin and‚ with its four sympathetic strings‚ sounds not unlike a treble viol. Geir Tveitt (1908-1981) was a central figure of the national movement in Norwegian cultural life during the 1930s. From the 1940s onwards Tveitt settled in Hardanger and devoted himself to collecting and adapting the Hardanger folk melodies. He wrote two concertos for the Hardanger fiddle.

Tveitt's music has seen something of a revival in recent years. However, the composer's complex relationship with far-right German ideologies has remained a tricky issue. Tveitt was a supporter of the so-called Neo-Heathenistic movement, which centred around the Norwegian philosopher Hans S. Jacobsen (1901–1980) in the 1930s in Oslo. Unfortunately, Jacobsen later became a member of Nasjonal Samling ('National Assembly'), which led the interim, pro-Hitler puppet government during the German occupation of Norway. Even though Geirr Tveitt displayed a deep interest in the theories of the movement, he never enrolled as a member of Nasjonal Samling.  For Tveitt, this proved devastating to his reputation, and contributed significantly to his becoming a persona-non-grata in the post-war musical establishment in Norway.

Ragnhild Hemsing is the sister of violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing [see my interview with Eldbjørg] and the two sisters organise their own festival in Norway.

Full details from the Brighton Dome's website.

A love of telling stories: Norwegian composer Bjørn Morten Christophersen on setting Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' to music

Bjørn Morten Christophersen (Photo Fartein Rudjord UIO)

Norwegian composer Bjørn Morten Christophersen's recent large-scale works have explored Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the journey of refugees through the life of the Norwegian-born first Duke of Normandy, and a Requiem for Norway's World War II sailors.  

His Charles Darwin-based oratorio The Lapse of Time came out on Simax Classics earlier this year [see my review]. A large-scale work for soloists, choir and orchestra, the piece sets Bjørn's own poetic libretto based on Charles Darwin's 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Premiered in 2013, in Kristiansund and Ålesund by Ensemble Dali, Kristiansund Sinfonietta and conductor Eirik Sørborg, eight years were to elapse before Bjørn was able to find the finance for further performance of the oratorio and after a year delay because of the pandemic, it was performed and recorded at Frogner Church, Oslo with Ensemble 96, Telemark Chamber Orchestra, Ditte Marie Bræin (soprano), Frank Havrøy (baritone), Inger-Lise Ulsrud (organ), Nina T. Karlsen and Per Kristian Skalstad (conductors).

Bjørn has PhD in musicology from the University of Oslo and an MA in Composing for Film and TV from Kingston University in London. Since 2003, he has taught arranging and composition at the University of Oslo.

Whilst Bjørn is not from a religious family, the fact that he has sung in choirs for many years and plays the organ meant that he was curious about church music and found himself drawn to it. He has also followed the debates between creationism and those who believe in evolution. It seemed that it was becoming impossible for the two sides to consider the two texts, the Bible and Darwin's On the Origin of Species, together. Bjørn grew up with the Natural Sciences, one parent was a doctor and the other a pharmacist. He wanted to make a piece that was meaningful for both sides, for those that believe in the Bible and in Natural Sciences.

With 'Arctic' she wanted to provide positivity and hope, to show what is worth preserving: Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing on her latest project

Eldbjørg Hemsing

The Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing recently released her debut album, Arctic, on the Sony Classical label. Recorded with the Arctic Philharmonic, the disc is a musical portrait of the Arctic featuring music by Jacob Shea alongside works by Frode Fjellheim, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Ola Gjeilo, James Newton Howard, Henning Sommerro, Selim Palmgren (1878-1951), Ole Bull (1810-1880) and Edvard Grieg (1843-1907). Recorded in one of the Artic Philharmonic's home towns, Bodø which is the second largest town in North Norway and located just North of the Arctic Circle, the recording was made in the cultural centre, Stormen (the storm) which opened in 2014. Eldbjørg comes from a musical family, both her mother and sister are violinists and together the two sisters organise a chamber music festival, The Hemsing Festival in their home town of Aurdal.

One or two statistics are perhaps helpful here, to convey the sheer distances involved. Bodø, just inside the Arctic circle, is around 1,200 km from Oslo in the very South of Norway. Tromsø is a further 500 km North of Bodø (some 1,700 km from Oslo) and it is over 900 km from Bodø to Honningsvåg at the very tip of Northern Norway. Aurdal, where Eldbjørg comes from, is some 170 km from Oslo, between Oslo and Bergen. All these distances are by road, courtesy of Google Maps, and for comparison, London to John O'Groats is 1,100 km.

When I ask Eldbjørg, why make an album about the Artic, she comments 'Why not?'

Aria Borealis Bodø: new singing competition and Early Music festival based in the only city within the Arctic Circle

Bodø (Photo Carl Erik Nyvold)

Bodø is a compact city just North of the Arctic Circle in Norway; the Northern-most city in the world and the only one within the Arctic Circle. It is a place to enjoy awe-inspiring natural landscape beneath an Arctic midsummer’s never-setting sun. But this year the launch of a new festival, the punningly named Aria Borealis Bodø, will be drawing Early Music lovers too. From 24 June to 2 July 2022 the city will be hosting the Aria Borealis Bodø International Competition for Early Music Singers and a companion festival of Early Music.

The idea behind the combined competition and festival is to take eight winners of the competition and place them with an ensemble of  historically informed performance specialists and treat them as equal partners in chamber-scale performances. Audiences will be able to follow the creative process as it unfolds from rehearsals to concerts, and discover more about the collaborative art of interpretation as the nine-day event unfolds.

The competition is open to singers born in 1985 or after, and eight singers have been chosen via a digital round that attracted over 100 entrants from 39 countries and the winners were selected by the jury which included soprano Dame Emma Kirkby, harpsichordist and Artistic Director of Concerto Copenhagen Lars Ulrik Mortensen, Theater an der Wien director Stefan Herheim, Finnish soprano Tuuli Lindeberg and Swedish tenor Anders J. Dahlin. 

At the festival the competition will have two live rounds, the first consisting of rehearsals and a concert with a chamber ensemble. For the second, contestants will compete in teams and act together in short scenes from a Baroque opera, oratorio or cantata with full orchestra and stage direction, which will lead to their second-round competition performance in Stormen Concert Hall Saturday, 2 July. Both rounds will be streamed live.

There is also a programme of lectures, concerts, talks, masterclasses and more, including performances from members of the jury, as well as the Aria Borealis Bodø Sessions, a course involving music students and amateur and professional musicians. Concerts and other sessions will be streamed to broaden the audience reach far beyond Bodø.

The inaugural Aria Borealis Bodø represents a pioneering collaboration between Nordic Baroque Scene (NBS), a network formed by the four leading Nordic Baroque orchestras, and Bodø’s Stormen Culture Centre, a concert hall, library and multi-purpose performance space opened in 2014. The competition winners will work with a pool of players drawn from Nordic Baroque Scene’s four constituent ensembles: Concerto Copenhagen, the Finnish Baroque Orchestra, Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble and Barokkanerne (Norwegian Baroque Ensemble).

Full details from the festival website.