The sheer diversity of Ultima events goes a great way towards explaining Oslo's creative impetus and influence within Northern Europe: the sense of play is tangible in deft, brave and astute programming. With the extension of Lars Petter Hagen's Ultima Festival directorship, taking a risk is still promoted, and very necessary in cultivating the talent and ideas we now expect from and associate with the music scene of Oslo. Ultima 2015, which I attended from 12 to 16 September, did not fail to deliver, provoking and poking at every twist and turn.
The Ultima Academy, which runs alongside the plethora of concerts and sound events of the main festival, is a vital and thought-provoking addition to what already must be a strenuous week for the Ultima team. Academy highlights were so many, including Alexander Schubert in discussion on conceptual strategies in his work and nyMusikk's Anne Hilde Neset welcoming François Bonnet in a pre-concert introduction to the background of the Groupes de Recherches Musicales, and plenty in between. There was a particular emphasis on lectures of a more scientific ilk pertinent to Ultima's 2015 theme, on nature.
Midday on Saturday is early in Oslo. Scattered around a deserted yard, overlooked by a striking, outsize, almost gothic graffiti artwork, a crowd straggled together. Mixed messages went back and forth about where and when Koka Nikoladze's (b. 1989) Sound Stencil 0.1 (2015, world premiere) would actually start. Kids around the corner were already at work with spray cans, their incessant soundtrack having started up for the day. This was coincidental, but certainly added authenticity and a nice twist to what happened next. A group of guys passed by – whom I identified as the percussionists involved in the piece – but disappeared for the moment. Within a few minutes the crowd was seemingly quorate, and the group of percussionists casually merged and began to beat in precise and stunning rhythmic unison with sticks on the iron railings of the yard gate. So far, so interesting. Then, one by one the percussionists broke free of the gate, moving at first along the wall of the yard, but soon swarming along graffiti-embossed streets, striking anything they could lay their sticks on: lamp posts, drainage covers, electricity boxes, gates – all these adopted as their new instruments in what felt like a mix of street protest and performance art. Residential streets merged into a busy road junction where audience and players were split for quite some time, then we moved back through more sleepy Saturday residential streets into a park by the Deichman Library, finishing up at Yongstorget. Synchronised audio scoring on the performers' smartphones dictated rhythmical patterns and other directions, as well as providing mutual audibility. Percussionists and audience spread, mingled, lingered. Buggies were pushed, the crowd mutable, and a spell had been cast, so we followed the sound. The experience was compelling; no one dropped off. In the second residential section a stillness and focus descended – the players and crowd stretched some distance, linked only through rhythm. A sleepy resident cast an eye out of his window to investigate all this unexpected clattering. Afterwards, in the park, it was as if Xenakis was evoked in an ambisonic circle of park lamp posts – parents broke free with their kids for a welcome bit of play.
Cecilie Ore's (b. 1954) Adam & Eve – A Divine Comedy (2015, Oslo premiere) is timely precisely because of its bold and defiantly antagonistic stance. What with Solidarity with Refugees marches taking place on Saturday 12 September in many European capitals, thousands have been provoked into direct political action in recent weeks, uncomfortable questions encroaching upon the notion of national identity and the very essence of what it is to be a decent human being. Knowing there was a city election and that Norwegians have a more social conscience than many, when I first entered the concert venue I was duped briefly into believing the banners strewn all over Kulturkirken Jakob's walls were to do with goings-on in the outside world. Feminist slogans daubed in both Norwegian and English, all brashly didactic, seemed initially simplistic. Interestingly, one of them, ‘Feminism is Humanism’, has haunted me since, particularly as it appears that at London's Solidarity with Refugees demonstration there was a placard upon which was scribed ‘it is not illegal to be human’; not a vastly dissimilar sentiment.
In the Ultima programme, Ore's piece is aptly captioned as ‘a burlesque, political and socially critical opera about fundamentalist religion and misogyny’. The techniques employed within it at first seem crass and abrasive, and a typical audience response might range from slightly uncomfortable squirming in the seat to total alienation. Clearly antagonism was intended but, to my knowledge, no one voted with their feet. Bertolt Brecht in his oeuvre employed verfremdungseffekt as a theatrical distancing device, alienating the audience so as to effect a more cerebral understanding of his work; Ore manages to reconfigure this alienating conceit in a variety of discombobulating ways. Firstly her narrative springs from a quotation from Genesis 3:16: ‘… in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you’. Opera/film narrative is generally built on the teleological assumption that boy gets girl (good thing), or boy gets girl, girl goes mad and dies (bad/sad thing). Ore turns this heterosexual assumptive conspiracy totally on its head: here no-one less than God, in various guises, is engendering the exploitation of one human upon another within the sanctity of marriage, contentiously implicating the innocence of newly born life within the power-play of wedlock. As with every theme woven into Ore's Adam & Eve, nothing was subtly deployed. Repetition was engaged didactically, which was not a comfortable experience: each word, each musical phrase, was an iterate grenade tossed into an audience comprising many couples out for an evening's entertainment.
Ore's abrasive message was emphasised by the use of ‘taboo’ language, particularly with regard to women and the female anatomy. This was perhaps an effort to desensitise the concert hall audience to what some would regard as repulsive language, from which they ordinarily would be shielded. Certainly exploration of language and subject matter here was exceptionally close to the bone. There was a bravery and optimism in asserting the right of issues such as Female Genital Mutilation to be woven into the work's very fabric, and also to be spoken and sung about within a concert setting, to display these themes as valid of expression in high art. Witnessing this in a church added extra intensity, no more so than when three women veiled in hijabs emerged and contributed to the steely narrative. When a friend had asked what I was next going to see, and I told him it was Adam & Eve, he referred to it as the ‘clit-opera’, so emotive and provocative is Ore's use of words. Each challenging phrase or individual word was by rule of thumb repeated three times, so it wasn't as if each word or expression could disappear within the scoring and not be heard: Ore pummelled the audience with each word, pounding through the dense and weighty material with remorseless theatrical and sonic energy.
In Comfort music (2015, world premiere), Knut Olaf Sunde (b. 1976) manipulated our musical, as well as other more experiential, sensibilities. Sunde split the audience into two groups, both of which were then treated to distinctive, yet similar, experiences; this was an exploration in audience manipulation. One audience was welcomed to the Vulcan arena with charming retro muzak and encouraged to drink a beer whilst seated on floor cushions, surrounded by Ensemble Aksiom. The surroundings led us to anticipate a nice and relaxing event. The remaining 30 members of the audience were bussed to another part of the city, to nødsentralen (‘the emergency centre’), a bunker built for the government in case of an emergency during the Cuban missile crisis. Situated in Torshov, this now old-fashioned communications centre was top-secret, discovered only in the late ’90s. Getting permission for this performance would have been a hurdle to overcome, but such is the trust in Ultima that it was permitted. Being crammed into a nuclear bunker must have been an uncomfortable experience; a colleague of mine described the reticence of the audience members as they crept warily in, unsure of what awaited.
Audiences in both venues were then immersed in an instrumental, minimalist sound world that transformed first into a spectrally nuanced electronic soundscape and finally into music that was loud and dirty; ugly enough for some people at least not to want to be there. (Those in the bunker heard a recording of the live performance given in the Vulcan arena the day before.) The hold Sunde exerted over the Vulcan arena audience kept us sitting in the round until the other part of the audience rejoined us in time for the final tutti. Then, out into the Oslo night.
Asking around afterwards it seems to me that experience within the audience varied to a great degree. For some, if the intention was to provide uncomfortable music, then it wasn't loud or disturbing enough, but to others this was truly a powerful experience which had exerted a significant effect on them. Of those in the bunker, one woman was particularly uncomfortable as she had a tendency to claustrophobia, but, when asked afterwards, all said they felt that they had benefitted from the experience and felt part of a memorable performance – not, as my colleague feared, that they had been cheated of the live performance. The intention in both scenarios, of course, was that we were to feel at least discomforted, and that our assumptions of what a concert is should be challenged.
no 10, nachtstück mit sonne (2015, world premiere) by Mathias Spahlinger (b. 1944), written for ensemble asimasimasa, was next up on the programme, offering quiet and detailed tutti textures which were resonant with glimmers of Feldman. There was minimal progression, rather a point in time was re-examined, re-worked and punctuated with occasional drops of light: Anders Førisdal's guitar passacaglia created a point of focus around which the other instruments gathered, and the piece finished with a slow and characteristically barely perceptible guitar cadenza. still/moving (2015, world premiere), also by Spahlinger, cavorted with delicacy between moments of unison (still) and phasing (moving). It is an instant classic, a work of such simple erudition and balletic finesse – music as simple beauty.
The Spahlinger works were paired brilliantly with the music of Øyvind Torvund (b. 1976), an acutely original talent. His talent is for the slick appropriation of everyday objects that are constructed into a unique meta-instrument, and Neon Forest Space (2009) provided as much fun in Oslo as it had in Huddersfield in 2014. Plastic Waves (2013) saw him reconstitute the ensemble into a provocative new multi-layered meta-instrument (as seems to be one of Torvund's defining techniques). The ensemble writing emphasised motion, propelling asimisimasa forward in waves of sound, similar to the squeeze-and-release of an accordion. A joyous piece! Noise, rock guitar, cello & clarinet provided subtle contemporary styling round the edges, alongside Nancarrow-style piano, sampled percussion and glass-smashing (which was as perplexing as hysterical) – this was a Utopia of free expression crafted with stunning precision. Here is a composer to watch who, with an ensemble at the top of their game, created a concert in traditional format that was anything but dull.
