Olav Anton Thommessen News
Norwegian composer and librettist
- opera
- Norway
- composer, professor, musicologist, librettist
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2024-04-24
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2020-07-18 09:39:30
Thankful to be able to play together at all: the Engegård Quartet on recording Mozart, collaborating with Ola Kvernberg and their festival devoted to Olli Mustonen's music
The Engegård Quartet (Photo John Petter Reinertsen) The Engegård Quartet (Arvid Engegård, Alex Robson, Juliet Jopling, Jan Clemens Carlsen) is a string quartet based in Norway but with a developing international reputation. The quartet's debut CD won praise The Strad, and more recent discs have included works by Grieg, Sibelius and the Norwegian composer Olav Anton Thommessen (born 1946), and the complete Schumann quartets on BIS. Like everyone else, the quartet's plans for 2020 have been upset, but when I chatted to Arvid Engegård and Juliet Jopling by Zoom they were surprisingly upbeat, with cultural events in Norway planning to re-start on a smaller scale and the quartets mini-festival devoted to the music of Olli Mustonen will be going ahead in Oslo in September. The quartet is part-way through recording Mozart's complete works for string quartet on the Norwegian Lawo label. Issued so far are discs of Mozart's […]
2017-02-02 16:45:34
Oslo Sinfonietta/Eggen (Aurora) Olav Anton Thommessen is something of an elder statesman of Norwegian contemporary music, with a prolific back catalogue and august institutional connections. He also has a pedigree in early experimentalism. Fellow composer Nigel Osborne remembers: “Olav played the cello and something that looked like a meat cleaver, which he would beat the floor with like an angry troll.” Thommessen’s ballet-opera The Hermaphrodite dates from the 1970s and uses texts by DH Lawrence, Isidore Ducasse and early Christian gnostics. It deals in matters of love, lust and sexuality and all feels wonderfully of its time – intense swooping vocals, strung-out instrumentals, ritualistic percussion, a mash-up of baroque opera, expressionist melodrama and heavily stylised Japanese Noh theatre. As a period piece it’s great fun, and this performance by the Oslo Sinfonietta under Christian Eggen is impressive: committed and energetic, with ultra-focused playing, vivid drama in the pacing and […]
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