It Might Have Been Oslo on a Midsummer Night

It's hard to convey the special qualities of the Risor Festival of Chamber Music in Norway to someone who has not been there. So the superb Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, the festival's co-artistic director, has done the next best thing and brought Risor to New York. On Friday night Mr. Andsnes and a roster of impressive young musicians presented the first of three programs at Zankel Hall, a mini-Risor Festival.

Of course the character of the Risor Festival, which takes place in late June, has a lot to do with its locale: a charming fishing village on the southeastern coast of Norway.

Musically, the goal is to bring together musicians for a brief but intense period of work. The schedule typically presents about 20 concerts in the space of six days: morning, noon and night, and sometimes midnight. In their programming Mr. Andsnes and his co-director, the Norwegian violist Lars Anders Tomter, have a knack for juxtaposing old and new works in provocative ways.

Friday night's program had works by Schumann, Janacek, Gyorgy Kurtag and Matthias Ronnefeld. A quality of wildness pervaded them all.

In the three elusive movements of Janacek's "Pohadka" ("Fairy Tale"), for cello and piano, recurring riffs and quizzical fragments convey a sense of radical discontinuity. Yet as played by Mr. Andsnes and the rhapsodic French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, the music seemed strangely inevitable.

Ronnefeld died in 1986 at just 27. Although he was born in Vienna and spent his young adult years in Hamburg, Germany, Denmark claims him, since his Danish mother, a widow, took the family to Copenhagen when he was a boy.

At 18 minutes, Ronnefeld's Sextet (1979) is his longest surviving work. Its five movements show a brilliantly gifted young composer enthralled with Gyorgy Ligeti and Berg yet bursting with avant-garde originality.

His rapturous sense of color, vivid ear for unearthly harmony and flair for drama captured the imaginations of the excellent players, representing, in the Risor way, a roster of nationalities: besides Mr. Andsnes and Mr. Queyras, there were the flutist Tara Helen O'Connor and the percussionist Daniel Druckman (American); the violinist Christian Tetzlaff (German); the clarinetist Martin Frost (Swedish); and the conductor Christian Eggen (Norwegian).

Mr. Kurtag's "Hommage à R. Sch.," a modernistic meditation on Schumann in six aphoristic movements for piano, viola and clarinet, proved an ideal prelude to Schumann's Piano Trio No. 3. Mr. Andsnes, Mr. Tetzlaff and Mr. Queyras gave an engrossing performance that conveyed both the wildness and the elegance in this mercurial music. We could have been in Risor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/arts/music/09ands.html