Postcard from Norway: Bergen International Festival

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Bergen is a beautiful, friendly city on the west coast of Norway where it fragments into fjords and islets. It still has many brightly coloured wooden houses, despite the fact that it has had major fires at regular intervals for a thousand years or so. Where there isn’t water, it is surrounded by hills, one of which has a handy funicular railway heading up to wonderful views and possibly lunch.

Every year the city holds a major international arts festival, the Festspillene i Bergen, with two weeks (this year 22 May to 5 June) of theatre, dance and music at venues all over the city and beyond. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was one of the attractions this year, performed with Grieg’s music, and Carlos Acosta’s dance company put in an appearance. The Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang and friends performed Robert Schumann’s piano trios; pianists Yuja Wang, Leif Ove Andsnes and Bertrand Chamayou took part, as did the Jack Quartet and Trio Mediaeval.

Members of two musical families featured during my short visit, beginning with cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his pianist sister Isata on 23 May, playing in the Håkonshallen, a grand Gothic hall originally built in the 13th century and restored after suffering fires, neglect and a 1944 explosion. First came Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata no.1, robust at the start, leading to dramatic dialogues and touches of darker hues, with fluent expressive passagework in the development. The opening of the Andante was gentle, caressed and vividly phrased, with Isata a small, delicate voice. Further in, the staccato semiquavers were neat and dry. The Allegro assai finale had velvet-toned, lyrical playing.

Before starting Beethoven’s Fifth Cello Sonata in D major, Sheku addressed the audience on the subject of the unseasonal heat. It was mid-20s Celsius, humid and with blazing sunshine; not what one expects in a city where they make jokes about how much it rains. ‘It’s wonderful,’ he said, ‘except when I’m playing.’ I suspect we all felt for him.

In the opening Allegro con brio they neatly struck Beethoven’s balance of the mellifluous and the rhetorical, with playing that was both questioning and full of resolve. The Adagio con molto sentimento d’affetto was poised and intimate, as if expressing private thoughts, and Sheku was sparing with his vibrato towards the end. The fugal finale was full of dancing energy, and led to an irresistible high-spirited finish.

In Chopin’s Cello Sonata they brought rich, expressive shaping to the composer’s florid melodic invention, with Isata splendid in the virtuosic piano writing. They chased each other athletically through the scherzo, performed the Largo with soulful simplicity and produced driving, muscular playing in the finale.

The Maisky Trio appeared at the same venue the following evening, with cellist Mischa Maisky joined by violinist son Sascha and pianist daughter Lily. They presented Rachmaninoff’s Trio élégiaque no.1 in true, full-blooded Romantic style (but not entirely blemish-free), as the composer flogs his four-note motif to death. Mischa’s intonation was not entirely secure in the horribly difficult harmonics that open Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, but once the piece was under way, they played with swooping passion and dry spikiness in constant juxtaposition. The Allegro con brio had wild, earthy ferocity (rather too wild at times), with an edge of expressive desperation. In the Largo there was keening intensity from the string players over the repeated chord sequence in the piano, paced as if they were reluctant to let go of every note. The Allegretto had a demonic air, the phrasing peppered with accents, vehement and relentless, and Lily pounding ferociously in the later stages, before they subsided into the bleak final Adagio.

Mats Eilertsen was a dab hand with double-stopped pizzicato. They were all clearly enjoying themselves no end, as was I

After the interval, Mischa and Lily played a set of arrangements of Schumann oboe romances and his song cycles Dichterliebe and Myrthen with shapely lyricism and a general air of regretful pathos, before Sascha returned for Brahms’s Third Piano Trio. They were all now clearly suffering from the heat and humidity. They built up a great head of steam in the development of the first movement and tripped along in the Presto non assai, their playing light and airy. The Andante grazioso, with its constantly changing time signature, was nervy and unsettled, before the fiery finale.

The younger Maiskys appeared again the next evening at the Troldsalen, an airy, light-wood recital hall adjacent to Troldhaugen, Grieg’s country house (half an hour’s drive away from Bergen). They began with Clara Schumann’s Three Romances op.22, with Sascha producing a lush sound, close to the bridge with a fat vibrato. In the bright acoustic the pair almost overpowered the music at the climax of the third Romance. They followed with two Rachmaninoff pieces: his Romance op.6 no.1 and one of his op.3 piano pieces Morceaux de fantaisie (the latter arranged by Mischa Maisky). Sascha played with veiled tone at the beginning of the Rachmaninoff sequence, and was variously passionate and robust, leaping up and down the lower strings with aplomb. His legato could be a little lumpy, but there was plenty of vivid emotional colour.

And then, of course, there was Grieg. They tackled the opening movement of his Third Violin Sonata at white heat, with Sascha showing an abundance of muscularity that carried through to the second movement Allegretto espressivo alla romanza, although there was tender, floating playing here as well. The finale was exuberant, with the big tune wonderfully noble when played on the G string.

Finally, for me, on 26 May there was a jaunt even further into the countryside to the house of Ole Bull, the great 19th-century violin virtuoso and friend of Grieg, for one of the more unusual concerts I have been to. Ragnhild Hemsing, playing the violin and Bull’s own Hardanger fiddle (the Norwegian instrument with sympathetic strings that seems never to have crossed any borders), was joined by jazz musicians Mathias Eick (trumpet) and Mats Eilertsen (double bass) for a concert full of improvisation on Norwegian folk music, Bach, Biber and Grieg. Parts of Bach’s Goldberg Variations were here, and Biber’s ‘Mystery (Rosary)’ Sonata no.1, along with traditional music from the Valdres region of southern Norway, much of it played with a jazzy tinge. Hemsing was terrific, and Eilertsen was a dab hand with double-stopped pizzicato. It was a marvellous concert, and they were all clearly enjoying themselves no end, as was I.

Oh, and the weather changed. A Bergen cloudburst is not to be taken lightly.