Let’s return to one of the great maxims of not just contemporary but all music: size isn’t important. In the case of Norway’s Only Connect festival, its short, 2½-day duration belied the fact that its content was highly concentrated. As such, one event started to blur into the next, into …
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Only Connect
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Very few performances at Only Connect 2023 failed to impress. Among the exceptions was Caminante by Michael Pisaro, premièred on the opening night by Trondheim Sinfonietta with bassist Michael Francis Duch. Though the work began well, establishing a nicely darkened texture that became almost gritty and dirty, as soon as …
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There can’t be many festivals that have as their name a direct command to the audience: Only Connect. This was my third time at Norway’s Only Connect festival, held this year in Trondheim, and each time i’ve attended there’s been a keen emphasis on the importance and necessity, from compositional, …
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The lack of ostentation in most of the music at this year’s Only Connect festival was perhaps nowhere more conspicuous than in a concert last Saturday devoted to French composer Pascale Criton. Performed by violinist Silvia Tarozzi, cellist Deborah Walker and singers Stine Janvin Joh, Signe Irene Stangborli Time and …
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There’s something absolutely right about the bringing together of Norway’s Only Connect – a festival that, as its name implies, encourages one to question (inter)connections between ostensibly disparate musics – with Tectonics, Ilan Volkov’s peripatetic festival the name of which evokes fundamental, underlying bedrocks that continually meet, connect and rupture. …
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From the lofty architecture of Sentralen, day two of the Only Connect festival took place in the infinitely more modest environment of Skippergata, a relaxed café-bar-nightclub with various large and small performance spaces. Though the venue was low-key, the concerts were anything but. Flautist Alessandra Rombolà’s rendition of Christina Kubisch‘s 1974 Emergency …
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At contemporary music festivals one becomes accustomed to expecting the unexpected. However, in the case of Norway’s Only Connect festival, which took place last weekend in Oslo, expectations were overturned in no small part by the weather, due to the country experiencing its warmest May in over 70 years, basking …