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Podcast: 230 – Bergen International Festival’s Lars Petter Hagen
In Thoroughly Good territory, Eurovision and classical music are far more closely related than most would think. Eurovision 1986 is a good example.
May 1986. I was eleven, watching the impossibility of Norway hosting the Eurovision after winning with La det Swinge the year before in Gothenburg and finally laying to rest the run of bottom rank and sometimes last place. In the eighties, the running joke was that Norway would get nothing. Bobbysocks clinched it with a runaway win in 1985. Norway got to host it for the first time the following year. Their moment to put the country on the map.
Norway’s host city was Bergen. Its venue, the Grieghallen – opened just 8 years before, a monument to Bergen’s local talent, Edvard Grieg. The contest’s presenter, a former Eurovision participant, Åse Kleveland, was then President of Norway’s Musicians Union. She would go on to be appointed Minster for Culture in Norway in 1990.
By Eurovision 1986, I was already a dedicated viewer. Appointment to watch TV as this came with a rigorous set of viewing arrangements for my family and me, drawn up and scrutinised by me with all of the ruthless efficiency of the show’s own scrutineer Frank Naef.
I didn’t know where Bergen was. I knew who Grieg was. I knew he was Norwegian. But I didn’t know where he was born. I just knew that whatever Norway was selling, it looked like a good time. The Norwegians were proud of their Eurovision win in 1985 just as they were of their local talent who live in a house he shared the address of in the title of a piece of music he’d written, but who didn’t want visitors turning up announced at. So much so, he erected a sign telling them to go away. My kind of chap.
Forty years later, I get to walk into the Grieghallen for the opening night of the Bergen International Festival. The place is a good deal smaller in real life than it is on TV. Not only was this an opportunity to hear Turangalila Symphony in an ideal acoustic and an optimum amphitheatre-style auditorium, but I could also marvel at how something that looked so big on TV had been squeezed into a hall with a 2,500-seat capacity. I wasn’t being all nostalgic. Rather, this was the feeling you get when a place turns out to be more meaningful than the idea you’d carried about it for 40 years.PlayInside Grieghallen
Bergen International Festival’s music choices in its 74th year were that week considered, bold, occasionally brutal. The Turangalîla Symphony on opening night — 20th-century music programmed without apology but maybe approached by those behind the endeavour with a little bit of trepidation. Who doesn’t like a bit of jeopardy? This was a city that seemed entirely at ease with the idea that art matters — not as aspiration, but as argument. It turns out, as you’ll hear in this interview with the Festival’s artistic director, not something arrived at by accident than by design.
Lars Petter Hagen is the artistic director of the Bergen International Festival. He is also a composer. He is thoughtful, candid, and — as I discovered — possessed of the Norwegian gift for appearing to agree with you before quietly dismantling everything you just said.
This conversation is about music, leadership, listening, and what a festival is actually for. It also contains two interruptions, which I have actively chosen not to edit out, because real life isn’t always unbearable.