The intellectual force with which Johannes Brahms in his Motet Op. 74 No. 1 struck a blow at bourgeois self-satisfaction is still outrageous.

The composer called the piece a “small treatise on the great why”, and the selection of texts from the third chapter of the Book of Job knocks both legs off humanistic idealism’s progressive thinking and belief in self-improvement.

Man cannot answer the great why of life on his own.

No emancipation will give him access to the reason why something is at all and not rather nothing.

According to the text, his own path also remains “hidden” because “God covers it from him”.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

Mogens Dahl Kammerkor sings precisely these lines in the eight-hundred-year-old Gothic Håkonshalle in Bergen in a particularly muted manner, vocally cowering, audibly intimidated by the confrontation with something incomprehensible.

The cleverly constructed program of the Danish choir, named after its conductor Mogens Dahl, is about giving the experience of powerlessness left by the corona pandemic a musical form that many listeners can find themselves in.

Framed by Brahms' early existentialist essay on Job and by Johann Sebastian Bach's motet "Jesu, meine Freude" - about inner peace and freedom, even if it "right away cracks and flashes" - a work by the young composer Missy Mazzoli: "Year of our burning".

To a stubbornly recurring pattern of oppressive minimalism, the chorus sings, in the words of Laura Lomas: “Turn away.

Turn your face away.

Shut the door.

Don't let them in.” One after the other, all of the sixteen singers turn their faces away from the audience.

And not only the pandemic, which is by no means over, concerns artists and guests at the seventieth Festival in Bergen, the largest multi-genre festival in Northern Europe, but also the war.

At the Lutheran communion service on Sunday Exaudi, where the Bergen Cathedral Choir sensibly embeds Frank Martin’s hauntingly sparse Mass in the liturgy, the leaflet with the songs and prayers shows a Russian icon: the Holy Trinity by Andrei Rublev.

The request for the unification of Christians through the Holy Spirit is demonstratively universal on this Sunday before Pentecost, beyond the borders of denomination and war.

The Bergen Festival is as much silence and contemplation as it is noise and fun.

As with the Salzburg Festival, there is opera, drama, concerts, plus ballet and often even circus.

Quadro's outdoor acrobats are giving a free performance for onlookers on Torgallmenningen, the western Norwegian city's main shopping street.

In the Grieghalle, the large, modern concert hall, a wistful variety show can be experienced in the evening: "The Mute", a pantomimic love story by and with Christian Eriksen and Janove Ottesen.

From the perspective of an old couple it is told how the two found each other, carried each other and dropped, parted and found each other.

The Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Nick Davies, plays music that sounds very much like a soundtrack,

doesn't quite reach the level of Michel Legrand and James Horner, but it's still better than the trash by Alexandre Desplat that is commercially available today.

The snow falls like powdered sugar of melancholy.