International interest

Their reporter spent four days in Bergen and saw both the opening show Sounds Like You as well as the many Jon Fosse events. He gives praise to Bent Sørensen’s music in Sounds Like You and the composer’s new works which premiered in Håkonshallen during the Festival. ‘Bergen can become dear to you with experiences like this,’ says Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s journalist. Sounds Like You is a performance many international journalists have noticed. It has received good reviews in German, Danish, Swedish and British newspapers. ‘Sounds Like You will even be played in Oslo and Copenhagen, please somebody, make sure Stockholm isn’t overlooked!’ pleads the reviewer in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.British newspaper Birmingham Post raves about Sørensen’s score in Sounds Like You, saying that it is ‘… one of breathtaking beauty, lyrical yet astringent, its instrumental colours strongly imagined, and with an eclectic resourcefulness which is post-modernism at its best.’ ‘Sørensen and his librettist Peter Asmussen have suggested new possibilities for music-theatre; let’s hope someone brings their piece to London, soon,’ writes the Daily Telegraph.

The FAZ reporter believes Bergen’s fresh take on the festival culture is a great advantage. ‘The aesthetic discourse in central Europe has had its soul scarred by war, dictatorships and political divide, and gets lost in dogmatic oppositions between tradition and modernity, empathy and reflection. And any positive relation to belief, belonging, nature and love are met with irony or suspected of being regressive. But then, in Bergen: you experience an end to these cramps, you discover connections where you were only prepared for breaks.’ More than 60 international journalists visited Bergen to cover the 2009 Bergen International Festival.