Risor Festival, Wigmore Hall, review

This mini-festival with a hand-picked crew over from Norway give London audiences a treat indeed.

Every year, the Norwegian fishing village of Risor plays host to one of the world’s great chamber music festivals, and the best of it comes to London for a mini-festival at the Wigmore Hall. The festival’s director, pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, brings over a hand-picked team mostly of fellow Scandinavians, though this year it also included that great Canadian virtuoso pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin.

If the previous concerts were at the stellar height of the final one, London audiences have had a treat indeed. It began with the hyper-compressed intensity of Berg’s Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, their arching gestures magnified by the balletic grace of clarinetist Martin Frost. He seemed to make Berg’s lonely phrases hang in the air long after the sound had faded, and Andsnes seized on the music’s sudden turns from spectral calm to violence.

The came Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a piece normally bedecked in the gorgeous colours of a large orchestra. But when played on two pianos, as it was here, the music takes on a new fascination, like a body seen under an x-ray machine. The two pianists Andsnes and Hamelin brought the best out of the monochrome medium, taking the hazy introduction to Part 2 at a much slower pace than any orchestra would dare, and the final “Danse Sacrale” at a thrillingly breakneck speed.

After that blazing first half came something musing and discursive. Under City Skin, a recent piece by Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin, took everyday sounds of the city - cars revving, those digitised voices that announce “doors closing”, footsteps - and arranged them in an artful montage heard over speakers. Mingled with them was music for a solo violist (played by Lars Anders Tomter) and the Risor Festival Strings. This “musicalised” the sounds, moving first in tandem with them and then becoming independent.

That might seem edgy and “urban”, but Wallin responds to city sounds the way composers of a bygone era responded to landscape – poetically, not being rushed by the city’s hectic pace. In truth, a more urgent pace might have overcome a feeling of being sometimes becalmed in one mood. But there were lovely poetic moments along the way, precisely imagined and beautifully played.

Finally came Honegger’s Second Symphony, a musical narrative that moves from oppression and desolation to jubilation. In this stunning performance from the Risor Festival Strings, it carried total conviction. 

From http://www.telegraph.co.uk