What is the city but the people," says William Shakespeare's class struggle tragedy "Coriolanus". In Bergen, Norway, it is citizens and visitors who pay homage to the city at the start of the festival: with a cheerful, ceremonial parade on a catwalk erected above the sidewalks: in front of video walls by Gisle Martens Meyer and bizarre photos by Thor Brødreskift, to the music of Finn Tokvam, the Bergen anthem "Nystemten" and the national anthem "Yes, we love this country". What a wonderfully sensual and thoughtful prelude to Northern Europe's most important multi-genre festival.
"Why is Bergen actually called the Salzburg of the North?" jokes a journalist colleague, "when can Salzburg be called the Bergen of the South? This is one step closer to the future." This may please the artistic director Lars Petter Hagen. It is important to him that not only "the garden of remembrance" is watered, but also that work is carried out in a "laboratory of the future" instead of scrambling in the superstructure. It is characteristic that he invited Alex Ross, the music critic of the "New Yorker", for a lecture and a discussion entitled "Thinking beyond the canon". In his book "The Rest is Noise", Ross has proposed ways to look for cross-connections between "classical" and "popular" music. With regard to modes of reception, it is said that the festival's programmes are intended to cause disturbance, create connections and provide pleasure. This time, the posthumous appointment of this year's Festival composer: Anne-Marie Ørbeck (1911 to 1996), whose first symphony was premiered in Bergen in 1954 and who will be commemorated with a "portrait concert", stands for the connection to tradition. This is now one of the inevitable challenges for festivals, as the rediscoveries of Florence Price in the USA and Ethel Smyth in England show.
Bergen was an outpost of the Hanseatic League
Bergen, founded in 1070 and one of the most important outposts of the Hanseatic League, has the charm of a stage itself. On the way through Bryggen, the district by the harbour, old pictures and photos on colourful walls remind us of medieval life. The path leads to the Håkonshalle, built in the middle of the 13th century, once a royal residence, now a venue for celebrations and concerts.
Nineteen works by fourteen composers on three instruments within 75 minutes – the Australian pianist Anthony Romaniuk probably met the audience's most diverse expectations. On the podium of the hall, framed by massive walls made of quarry stones and covered by a steep wooden vault, stood, as announced on the program note, a piano, a harpsichord, an electric piano CP70; in between was a stool on which the pianist turned from piece to piece, trying to combine the miniatures into a diffuse, small-scale large-scale work.
Anthony Romaniuk on three instruments
The Australian is announced, in fashionable Newspeak, as a pianist who is "extremely versatile between jazz and early music" and "explores" all conceivable keyboard instruments. It would have been helpful to find out why he sometimes uses the piano and sometimes the CP70 for Erik Satie's three "Pièces froides". What the connection between the pieces is supposed to consist of can only be guessed at. It is about the idea of the perpetual motion machine and the search for hypnosis, trance and groove through the – according to which principle? – mixed miniatures between Bach and Purcell and Satie and Glass. The fact that Romaniuk follows the rhythmically monotonous final movement of Beethoven's Sonata op. 31 No. 2 tries to give an extra kick by an excessively long improvisational thunder can be enjoyable for those of good will. But when a Toccata arpeggiata by Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger, arranged by him, is mixed into a synthesizer sound at the end, the disturbing pleasure of an imitation can be experienced.