This autumn’s season of contemporary music festivals hit the ground running this past weekend with the opening of Ultima Oslo, which this year boasted a fascinating and varied lineup of artists from around the world, across a broad range of musical and sonic disciplines.
The opening event was an immediate highlight: sound artists Jana Winderen, Chris Watson and Tony Myatt presented an astonishing multi-channel soundscape of the northern Atlantic entitled Fathom, created from field recordings made from the Oslofjord to the north Norwegian islands of Lofoten and Jan Mayen. The sounds of the under-sea environment are of mind-boggling richness and density, and were presented simply and directly in all their musicality. Listening in the civic surroundings of Oslo Town Hall, there was a noted kinship with the intricate social world of marine mammals – a world wreathed in melancholy as humans continue to encroach via overfishing and deep-sea mining.
The other highlight of the first weekend felt like a mirror image of this opening soundscape. Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart, who together make up the duo Dubmorphology, presented a similarly astonishing, wondrously dark and dense performance at the Henie Onstad Art Centre, with layers of electronics creating a sonic environment that seemed to rival the north Atlantic in its depth. Incorporated into the electronics were recordings of the immediate environment surrounding the performance space – and Mathison and Stewart’s sounds seemed like a great, radical, sonic intervention. In the midst of this vast swirl, writer Kodwo Eshun gave a remarkably powerful spoken address, outlining his signature idea of “sonic fictions” – and how a tradition of radical Black artists have made interventions into our broken, grossly unjust society, engaging in cosmogenesis, the creation of alternative future worlds. Performances this mind-expanding are rare.
The first weekend at Ultima also presented two theatrical events, on notably differing scales. Trond Reinholdtsen has one of the most distinctive – and madcap – artistic practices in contemporary music, having devoted the past decade or so to the sprawling Norwegian Opra, or “Ø”, which has now expanded to include its own bespoke location, a farmhouse in Sweden, where on this occasion 12 chosen listeners were invited to witness the opera’s latest episode, simulcast back to an audience in Oslo. Reinholdtsen’s work is completely unique and strange – and it seems unjust that he hasn’t been let loose on the vastly sophisticated operatic resources available in Oslo. Also presented at Ultima was a new production of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha, a carefully-wrought production no doubt (and a box-office draw too), but it felt a missed opportunity when Reinholdtsen’s work is right there.
The Oslo Sinfonietta presented a concert on Saturday which featured two Norwegian composers juxtaposed with arrangements of György Kurtág’s Jatekok miniatures. With Kurtág’s laconic microludes played in multiple orderings (there was a lot of paper-shuffling), conductor Christian Eggen and the Sinfonietta interleaved a performance of a new work, The Grammar of Ornament, for violin and ensemble by Anna Berg, a young Norwegian-Vietnamese composer. This piece drew explicitly from the đàn bầu, an ancient monochord of traditional Vietnamese music. Guro Kleven Hagen’s solo violin was lyrical and rather romantic, accompanied by the ensemble mostly in heterophony (a single large melody augmented with ornamentation). After a busy and slightly breathless opening, with quick transitions from one section to the next, the piece grew increasingly sparse, though no less romantic.
Norwegian composer Øyvind Mæland’s new piece Strokes of Imagination was more droll, seeing similarities with Kurtág’s childlike Jatekok. Chorales with trills and jangles, moving fauxbourdon, nervous arpeggios, and a staggering, slouching dance, it was both playful and angst-ridden. And its ending was strikingly low key – without being able to tell if the piece was merely doing its thing or building to something, it suddenly stopped. It recalled being a kid and having to abruptly stop playing after being called down to dinner.
Norwegian chamber ensemble Cikada also presented a concert on the first weekend at Ultima, with a programme of composers from outside of Norway. Clara Iannotta’s echo from afar (ii) from 2022 is a great place to start if one wants to know the current vogue in contemporary chamber music, with the ensemble surrounded by a forest of extra instrumentation: cymbals, singing bowls, zithers and guitars with e-bows, and at one point a remarkable solo for bass musical bow, swung around in great circles like a bullroarer. The flute, clarinet, piano and string instruments themselves almost disappear in a delicate landscape of inharmonic, metallic sonorities.
Sofia Avramidou’s A Hug to Die has some similarities to Iannotta’s work in certain respects, but leant more towards noisy, raspy, scratching sounds. The mood, while dark, become more playful and dance-like – despite the piece’s origins, inspiration coming from Martin McDonagh’s drama The Pillowman about a spate of child murders. Cikada also performed a new work by Toronto-based composer Linda Catlin Smith, which differed hugely from Avramidou and Iannotta and illustrates the vast gulf that can exist in contemporary music on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Into the Woodlands began with meandering piano, answered by quiet minor-mode chords in the ensemble, enriched with tam-tam, proceeding through a series of modal-chromatic landscapes, some seeming more familiar than others. At times, it seemed to be a procession of cadences – one sense of an ending after another, a series of postludes. When it ended I was even surprised it had done so.
Another highlight of Ultima’s first weekend was an extraordinary new concert-length work by Nepalese-Norwegian composer Sanskriti Shrestha, who also performed tabla and Nepalese percussion, joined by her uncle Dheeraj Shrestha on tabla also. At the centre of this new work Levitate was an astonishingly virtuoso percussion performance from Sanskriti and Dheeraj, the former also singing intricate rhythmic patterns in vocal tabla bol – they were joined by Dev Lama on the bansuri flute. Surrounding the central Nepali performers were a selection of others: Andreas Wildhagen improvised drumkit and electronic percussion, Bendik Baksaas performed on live electronics, pianist Anja Lauvdal also performed Indian harmonium, as well as two performers versed in traditional Norwegian music, Synnøve Brøndbo Plassen (vocals) and Erlend Viken (Hardanger fiddle).
While such a setup might seem sprawling, this work was anything but, tightly organised across its hour-long duration, yet also allowing all the musicians to breathe and to exert themselves individually to an impressive degree. Most of the band were performing from memory, customary in Indian classical music, and the composed material was often of enormous rhythmic and melodic intricacy. Simply coordinating music of this complexity is a major task, but achieving the artistic subtlety and coherence across borders that Sanskriti Shrestha demonstrated is a major achievement. The audience responded with a huge standing ovation.
Many other events also went on in the first weekend, including a radical and noisy new work by Raven Chacon outside the Oslo Opera. Sound art exhibitions continue throughout the week (including a remarkable installation by Øystein Wyller Odden utilising a forest of individual organ pipes), as do talks and films, sound walks, and co-productions with the By:Larm festival, which presents indie, rock and electronica artists. Ultima even includes club nights. Upcoming concerts include appearances from the Oslo Philharmonic performing Julia Wolfe, and Ensemble Modern performing leading Norwegian composer and vocalist Maja S K Ratkje. Ultima is clearly one of the standout contemporary music festivals anywhere in the world, a model for musical meetings across boundaries, and radical open-mindedness.
Lawrence attended Ultima Oslo as part of its International Delegates Programme.
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