This visit by Bergen’s contemporary music ensemble BIT20 Ensemble opens with a string quartet from Norway’s great maverick serialist, Fartein Valen. 

When he wrote his String Quartet No 0, Valen was sounding more like Bruch than Berg, studying with the former composer in Berlin.

After Valen’s warm, late-Romantic styled quartet Taavi Oramo conducts the premiere of a new Haydn-inspired work by Bergen-born composer Ketil Hvoslef, and works by Kristine Tjøgersen and Eivind Buene, including the latter’s Lessons on Darkness.

‘We are not interested in darkness itself,’ Buene says of his piece, which explores the friction between old and new, complex and simple, ‘but what it hides. That is what scares us. What is it that we don't know about ourselves?’

Taavi Oramo | conductor

BIT20 Ensemble

Programme:

Fartein Valen

String Quartet No. 0

Ketil Hvoslef

La Scala (commission, world premiere)

Kristine Tjøgersen

Seafloor Dawn Chorus

Eivind Buene

Lessons in Darkness