Thursday 12 September 2019

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," said Neil Armstrong when he set foot on the moon fifty years ago. For the first time we saw the globe from outside.

At tonight's concert, we look out into the room with scientists, Eric Whitacre's atmospheric music, and get to hear a child's vision of heaven in Gustav Mahler's symphony.

Tonight's concert begins our new series Next step, a journey through music and science, in collaboration with the University of Bergen. Together with the researchers Arve Aksnes and Susanne Flø Spinnangr and through the evening's repertoire, we turn our gaze towards outer space.
At all times, scientists as well as composers have been fascinated by the infinite space that surrounds us. Grammy-winning composer Eric Whitacre's work Deep Field is inspired by the world's most famous space observatory – the Hubble telescope, and its greatest discovery: the Hubble Deep Field, which includes more than three thousand galaxies no one had seen before, each composed of hundreds of billions of stars! The music is accompanied by images from Hubble's discoveries and a dizzying perspective is drawn up as we travel from our own globe to the farthest corner of the universe, almost all the way back to The Big Bang!

With the help of the Deep field app, the audience is given the opportunity to participate in the performance of the end of the work. Mahler's Fourth Symphony is a bright and optimistic work, from the opening bells to the finale's song of heavenly life.

The Bergen shooting star Caroline Wettergreen will be heard in no less than three of our productions this season, and this evening it is she who sings about the heavenly joys, where everyone lives an angelic life in peace and quiet, while St. Peter watches it all.