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Thursday 4 December 2008

A world elsewhere

Henrietta Bredin visits Oslo's new opera house and finds it impressive, both inside and out

However exhilarating it is to look at and however much fun it is to scramble over — when snow-covered possibly even to ski on — this is after all a building created for performance. There’s an auditorium, traditionally horseshoe-shaped, with 1,400 seats. More oak here, but of a darker shade, and a shimmering disc of a chandelier, the light from which is refracted through hundreds of textured glass blocks and gives an extraordinary impression of natural light, as if the roof is open to the sky. This sort of inspired trickery is something that Snøhetta excel at, as was possible to see in their lovely, twistingly deceptive summer pavilion at the Serpentine last year. In addition there is Scene 2, a black-box space for up to 440, in which the seating can be arranged in numerous different ways, and a studio which I didn’t get to see but is mainly for rehearsals and will be able to accommodate up to 200 people.

The theme for the opening season of work was other-worldly, reflected in the choice of Monteverdi’s Orfeo for Scene 2 and a group of dance pieces by Jirí Kylián entitled Worlds Beyond on the main stage. As a connecting thread between the two, a work called Underworld had been devised, during which the audience was led beneath the stage and through the backstage areas of the house. Altogether, this represented a pretty good work-out for the facilities. Orfeo was a co-production with Opera North and I had already seen it in Leeds, in the gilt-encrusted, 19th-century splendour of the Grand Theatre. In many ways it benefited from being in a smaller space and one that offered less visual distraction to compete with the luridly lit, drug-addled vision of the underworld that this version presented. For those like myself, still unconvinced by surtitles, but recognising how beneficial many people find them, there is the perfect solution — a seat-back panel which you can turn off or on at will. And the level of illumination is clear but not overbright so doesn’t distract.

In the big auditorium, the dark wood panels and flooring are fairly austere but the seats are comfortable and the sightlines excellent — I sat in the stalls but had previously been up to the circle and beyond. The flexibility and scope of the stage area was well tested by a sequence of Kylián dance works ranging from Falling Angels, in which eight women never leave the stage, dancing to Steve Reich’s Drumming with total discipline and awesome levels of energy, to a Finale which involved the entire company, all swathed in voluminous folds of gold lamé so that they looked like an overflowing tin of Quality Street on the move. At one point, a lava flow of dancers poured through the auditorium and up out of the orchestra pit in a moment so joyously over the top it brought a shout of laughter from the audience. I wasn’t able properly to judge the acoustic as the dancers performed to recorded music until an isolated and startlingly unexpected moment at the very end of the evening when a solitary figure appeared at the side of the stage to sing ‘Der Leiermann’ from Schubert’s Winterreise. The sound was warm and clear and the singer appeared to have little trouble in projecting.

Underworld, the piece that was designed to link the experience of the other two works, was, I’m sorry to say, one of those ideas that should have been discussed thoroughly and then firmly dismissed. Timed groups gathering in the foyer were led through a tangle of dimly lit corridors at the ends of which, every now and again, could be discerned a group of palely-leotard-clad children ululating plaintively or a pair of dancers making slow and portentous gestures. By the time everyone had finally emerged from this experience, the first ones through had been waiting for nearly an hour and were bored, restless and ready for a drink and/or a pee. And as a result, Worlds Beyond didn’t start until nearly half past eight and, as it had two intervals, made for a painfully long evening.

Choice of repertory is always going to be subject to individual taste and response and this was a minor glitch in an experience which was otherwise wonderfully uplifting. The opera house is a glorious new building, a source of justifiable national pride, a home for a lively and burgeoning opera and ballet company and a place that any visitor to Oslo will want to experience, along with the Munchs and, another place I can highly recommend, Norway’s celebration of polar exploration, the Fram Museum.

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