A world elsewhere
Henrietta Bredin visits Oslo’s new opera house and finds it impressive, both inside and out
Oslo is a small city, with a population of just over half a million, but it now boasts, funded entirely from the public purse, and on budget — Olympic Committee, please note — a spanking new all-singing, all-dancing opera house which has already rooted itself deeply in Norwegian affections, despite initial resistance from many quarters, especially in rural areas. Completed an impressive five months ahead of schedule, it sits on the waterfront in the old harbour area of Bjørvika like an iceberg that might slip into the fjord at any minute.
A governing idea behind it was that it should prove a popular gathering place for people whether or not they were planning to attend an opera or ballet performance, and this seems to have been a resounding success. On a glittering June day I found a family with a baby in a push chair having a picnic on the roof, assorted half-naked sun-worshippers spread like basking seals on a long, paved slope leading down into the water and, inside, bunches of contented people drinking coffee, eating pastries and admiring the boat-studded, gull-swooping view through a vast expanse of glass.
Snøhetta, the architects responsible for the building, have taken inspiration from the Norwegian landscape in winter, so that it looks from the outside, all interlocking planes of white marble and glass, like a cross between an ice floe and a craggy snowcovered mountainside. The interior is light-saturated with, to one side, a staircase and a great curved wall made of Baltic oak and, to the other, a pale green and white honeycomb structure designed by Olafur Eliasson behind which is a cloakroom (which at the moment, with no bulky outdoor clothes hanging there, resembles a bare-branched steel forest) and generous, beautifully designed lavatories.
It is, at the moment, quite difficult to reach the opera house, at any rate on foot, as the entire harbour area surrounding it is subject to a massive redevelopment, so there are cranes and diggers everywhere you look and numerous holes being dug so that a busy network of roads can, by 2011, be rerouted underground and a large area of parkland planted in its place. Over the next few years, this will become the cultural quarter of Oslo, with the National Library moving here and the Munch Museum. This is not a project that is being undertaken by halves and the opera house is at the very heart of the planning.
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 otherworldly, 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 workout 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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