After two years of planning, our program for the Lofoten International Chamber Music Festival has finally been published. It has been a pleasant process where the festival has been in close dialogue with the musicians. The program is made up of repertoire that the musicians come with fully prepared, and this must then be fitted into music where the musicians are mixed in completely new constellations. This part of the program is rehearsed during the day during the festival.
Some of the musicians - such as Trio Con Brio Copenhagen, Joachim Carr and Denés Varjon have been here several times before, and they have also played together in many different contexts. The Engegård Quartet has been our "house orchestra" since 2006.
The Marmen Quartet and Anna Fedorova are participating for the first time.The world-famous pianist Marc-André Hamelin participated with us in 2016, and we have tried many times in the past to get him back. We are therefore proud to finally have this artist on the poster.
Hamelin is gaining greater and greater recognition as a composer, and we have the honor of being among the first to perform his magnificent brand new piano quintet.
His recent recording of Beethoven's greatest piano sonata - the so-called Hammerklaver sonata - has received rave reviews, and it was therefore natural to ask him to play it with us.
In a region like Lofoten - an area without long traditions for classical music - it has been natural to play music by well-known composers. And we then have their masterpieces at the top of the list. That is why composers such as Joseph Haydn - the father of chamber music and the symphony - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms are always on our programme.
But classical music has many masters, even in our own time, and therefore it is just as natural to have names such as Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Sergej Prokofiev, Dmitrij Shostakovich, Bela Bartok and György Ligeti.
But we are also keen to showcase some of the brand new music, and therefore have "blood-fresh" music by English Julian Anderson from 2024 and Hannah Kendall from 2022.
But we have hardly had a festival without music by the greatest master himself, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Frederic Chopin is the pianist's composer, and for once there will be a lot of the Polish master who settled in Paris early on. We are therefore very pleased to be able to present all four of his Ballads in one festival. It is the brilliant Ukrainian pianist Anna Fedorova who is responsible for this.
And then there will Norwegian folk music!
We have two of the country's most prominent representatives in this year's programme, Berit Opheim (vocals) and Per Anders Buen Garnaas (harding fiddle). These offer melodies and tunes taken straight from the country's age-old traditions, and we also get to hear folk music adapted by Edvard Grieg and Geirr Tveitt. Then with the original before the composers' versions.
The core of chamber music is found in the string quartets, and this year we have a total of four quartets. We've never had that before, and this is because the festival is part of an EU project called MERITA, which works precisely to strengthen the position of younger quartets in European music life. Read more about MERITA here >>>
Quartetto Goldberg from Italy and Quartetto Gerhard from Spain take part under this umbrella.
Read the program here >>>
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