Arctic Chamber Music Festival on Spitsbergen | EUROtoday

There is apple pie in God’s front room. Siv Limstrand baked it. The nimble, cheerful lady in a Norwegian cardigan and collared shirt labored on the streets for a few years – within the metropolis mission of Trondheim, as a pastor within the emergency room, so to talk. She is aware of that non secular wants don’t ask for confessional writings. She is now a Lutheran minister at Svalbard Kirke, the northernmost repeatedly working church on the planet, in Longyearbyen on Svalbard. Constantly working means: The church is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days per week. Anyone who needs can come, whether or not Christian or not. She has additionally blessed two Chinese individuals. There is a church service each second Sunday and a waffle service each Tuesday night: a espresso and cake meal with a liturgical setting.

The group room in entrance of the church corridor is overwhelmingly cozy: partitions made of sunshine wooden, armchairs and sofas with blueberry-colored upholstery, and from the home windows probably the most stunning view over Longyearbyen, the Advent fjord, a milky blue sky and the snow-covered massif of Hiorthfjellet, the deer mountain, which glows pink within the mild of the low solar.

This Sunday morning the Arctic Chamber Music Festival is a visitor on the church. The Saphir Quartet performs: Amanda Noor Vatn, Philippe Jayer, Torje Råbu, Iris Kalliovirta, all born in 2006, extremely delicate and gifted college students from the Barratt Due Music Institute in Oslo, who, with the braveness of their youth, plunge into the darkness of Franz Schubert’s string quartet “Death and the Maiden” – harsh, however at all times vulnerably shut to 1 one other in tone and breath. The 4 of them are nonetheless youthful than Schubert was when he wrote this quartet, and but they already know quite a bit about unchangeable issues that damage.

Before that, Limstrand preaches about Sunday, the primary day of creation: “Then God separated the light from the darkness and called the light day and the darkness night. Then evening and morning became the first day,” she reads from the Bible. It’s a particular time in Svalbard, probably the most stunning time of the yr, says an American vacationer who retains coming right here. Everyone is respiration a sigh of reduction on the finish of the polar night time. The period of sunshine will increase by twenty minutes per day. Even if the solar is just too low to penetrate over the Sukkertoppen mountain, the 324 meter excessive sugar loaf east of the settlement, and fall instantly into Longyearbyen, we see it in its reflection: Thursday 1 / 4 of Hiorthfjellet was pink, Friday a 3rd, Saturday half; on Sunday virtually the complete mountain as much as the foot shines above the Adventsfjord.

Limstrand additionally preaches about this in language that is so simple as it’s poetic: the created mild shines out of the creatures. We all mirrored that mild. “Reflections on Twilight” is the title of this live performance, which proves above all that folks like Schubert confuse mild and darkness, which God separated so clearly. This designed return to chaos can be a part of artwork.

People like to return to the live shows in church, says Limstrand: “They are looking for a focus. They long for an hour of deep attention beyond their work world or their everyday worries.” Among the locals there are two girls from Bergisch-Gladbach, vacationers who’ve discovered a handout for the pageant within the excellently designed Svalbard Museum, which cleverly and vividly tells the pure and cultural historical past of the Arctic archipelago with Svalbard at its heart. The Arctic Chamber Music Festival has existed since 2018. Three establishments have come collectively to make it attainable: the Arktisk Filharmoni in Bodø and Tromsø, the Voksenåsen instructional institute in Oslo and the corporate Svalbard Adventures, which runs a lodge in Longyearbyen however primarily organizes snowmobile safaris and boat excursions.

The Arktisk Filharmoni brings collectively the Sinfonietta Bodø and the Tromsø String Orchestra. With 44 musicians, it’s the northernmost skilled symphony orchestra on the planet and owes itself to the ambition of the Kingdom of Norway to ensure equal dwelling situations for all individuals within the nation – no matter which area they dwell in. This contains entry to classical music live shows. third of Voksenåsen is funded by the Swedish authorities to strengthen Swedish-Norwegian relations. The academy is dedicated to youth and grownup schooling. Her three areas of labor are strengthening democratic self-responsibility together with the prevention of anti-Semitism, coping with literature and selling classical music via live shows, in addition to supporting extremely gifted younger musicians in cooperation with the Talent Norge program. In Longyearbyen, curated by Peter Herresthal, pupils and college students come along with the professionals from the Arktisk Filharmoni or with profitable soloists such because the precocious, very considerate violinist Johan Dalene and the extraordinarily attentive, but intelligent pianist Sebastian Svenøy.

The program is pleasantly daring. In the outdated cable automotive headquarters, the place the vans carrying laborious coal from the mines used to journey to the harbor, Åsmund Moen and Kristoffer Almås, the 2 drummers of the Arktisk Filharmoni, play “Workers Union” by Louis Andriessen. So nothing nice, avant-garde dedication to the proletariat, which, nevertheless, doesn’t compromise on inventive requirements. Both drummers incorporate the metal building of business structure into their enjoying. The viewers – and there are fairly a number of who discover themselves within the excessive loading corridor at minus 15 levels – is contaminated by the momentum of the 2 musicians, whose enjoying stays admirably exact in all tempo modulations and shimmeringly colourful within the coloration adjustments.

Longyearbyen owes its title and existence to the American timber magnate John Munro Longyear, who mined coal in Svalbard along with his Arctic Coal Company from 1905 to 1916 earlier than promoting the mines to the Norwegian investor consortium Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani. Coal mining right here has by no means been extra worthwhile, Terje Aunevik, the mayor of Longyearbyen, tells us. Only round 2010, when the value of coal was very excessive, did the mines make some revenue. Otherwise the state sponsored them – till the final pit was closed final yr. Until 1998, there weren’t even communal constructions within the settlement. Everything, completely every part, was owned by the coal firm. And the settlement with its halls, silos and sheds, the achievement packing containers for the human wants of dwelling, consuming and incomes cash, is just not an architectural magnificence. Only the brand new quarter with the accommodations, eating places and boutiques, created on account of a long-term marketing strategy for the time after the looming coal phase-out, seems somewhat extra snug and is somewhat paying homage to Zermatt.

Longyearbyen is in transition. The exploitation of fossil fuels is over. Today the town lives from tourism, which is way more worthwhile than coal mining ever was. And she lives from analysis. Svalbard has the best density of satellite tv for pc stations on the planet. Earth actions and local weather information are recorded right here. Here, UNIS, the University Center in Svalbard, is a prime institute for Arctic research, which, along with researchers, additionally attracts round 400 college students from everywhere in the world. After Tora Augestad sang Reinbert de Leeuw’s fashionable rendition of songs by Robert Schumann and Schubert with the Arktisk Filharmoni underneath Christian Eggen’s path underneath the title “In the wonderful month of May” in a dreamy and cabaret-like method, German is spoken within the Kulturhaus. A pair from Schwerin is at the moment visiting their daughter. She is finding out geomatics at UNIS and want to keep right here, ideally on the Arctic Research Institute in Ny-Ålesund, northwest Spitsbergen. The mother and father are company for the fourth time in two years.

Once you perceive that Longyearbyen has a inhabitants that consists largely of lecturers and individuals who work in high-end tourism, the demanding pageant program is now not stunning. There are even John Cage’s sonatas for ready piano with the fakir-like astonishing pianist Yegor Shevtsov. All of this might additionally happen within the Radialsystem in Berlin or on Kampnagel in Hamburg.

The inhabitants of Longyearbyen has doubled in twenty years and the variety of kindergartens has tripled. The high quality of life is excessive. But you’ll be able to’t go away the settlement so simply. There aren’t any roads to Ny-Ålesund or the Russian mining settlement of Barentsburg. So it’s a must to work regionally. One pageant follows the subsequent: jazz, blues, choir, chamber music, movie. There are three choirs on the town. Isak, in his mid-twenties, certainly one of our guides on the snowmobile safari, protects us with a rifle and a sign pistol from the very elementary hazard of a polar bear assault. You will not be allowed to go away the settlement and not using a weapon: polar bears are man-eaters. But in any other case, Isak performs the piano, sings within the males’s choir and listens to jazz radio within the automotive.

The great thing about Svalbard brings tears to your eyes. On the one hand, due to their elegant delicacy and the overwhelming play of colours on the sky, ice and snow. On the opposite hand, due to their hazard. Global warming in Svalbard is happening 5 to 6 instances sooner than the worldwide common. The journalist Line Nagell Ylvisåker wrote the stunning e book “My World is Melting” (Hoffmann & Campe 2021) about it. The hazard of avalanches and landslides is rising. In 2015 and 2017, such accidents in Longyearbyen crushed homes and killed individuals. This is likely one of the the explanation why Svalbard is the hotspot for international local weather analysis.

One night we’re sitting at a live performance within the driveway of the previous Pit 3. Tora Augestad, charismatic vocal seductress with a particular sense for lengthy, color-changing last tones, sings songs by Kurt Weill and Stephen Sondheim. Together with Yegor Shevtsov, the pianist of the Arktisk Filharmoni, she got here up with the concept of ​​intertextually interweaving the numbers. Shevtsov, refined and chic, accompanies the Mackie Messer track compositionally based mostly on the E main invention by Johann Sebastian Bach. Because the important thing and first chords are similar, he precedes Sondheim’s “I’m loosing my mind” with Edvard Grieg’s “Arietta” from the “Lyric Pieces” op. 12; He introduces Weill’s “Surabaya-Johnny” with Claude Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie”. And as a result of Shevtsov is Ukrainian, Augestad sings the track “White Nights” by Ihor Shamo, which Shevtsov prepares with a “Valse noble et sentimentale” by Maurice Ravel. It’s a fascinating sport of attraction and wit with these two – in a mine!

Just a number of meters from listed below are the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s seed vault because the earth’s organic reminiscence, and the Arctic World Archive, which goals to protect humanity’s cultural belongings on microfilm and nanofilm for a minimum of two thousand years. Seed financial institution and database as the way forward for Svalbard: The climatically threatened archipelago holds our backup copies for the tip of the world – a wierd intertwining of hope and despair. And in the course of all of it, a girl baking apple pie. He tastes good!