Scandinavia at the Barbican - London Barbican Center's Festival of Scandinavian Arts

Contemporary Review, Feb, 1993 by Louis Muinzer

One great feature of that Scandinavian presence is its dynamic relationship with the landscapes of its five component nations. Fjord and shore, mountain and moor, plateau and forest are both stage settings and actors, the substance of a thousand different dramas. That topographical intimacy characterizes the wordscapes of the Icelandic sagas (featured in two festival programmes), and has been passed in verbal and visual tradition down into our own century. At the Barbican, that sense of a resonant, living terrain was especially evident in the pictorial arts -- in some of the photographs, for instance, of the Icelanders Pall Stefansson and Gudmundur Ingolfsson and in the moving pictures of Ingmar Bergman. And if the powerful 19th century landscape painters were not represented at the festival, there were later works in 'Border Crossings' that illustrate the point with a special eloquence, for they lie closer to the contemporary Nordic sensibility than the work of the older artists: the Dane Edvard Weie's shore scene 'Sunlight on the Sea, Christianso', for instance, or Edvard Munch's 'Train Smoke'. The latter is especially striking, for its subject suggests a confrontation of technology and the natural world; yet Munch's smoke merely pours from a scarcely visible locomotive and patterns itself into a peaceful evening beside the Oslo Fjord. Industrial power has become an accent of its setting, an emanation of the landscape.

In Scandinavian music, too, the natural landscape was a festival presence, especially when married to appropriate poetry. Sibelius' 'Autumn Evening' (sung by the extraordinary Finnish soprano Karita Mattila at a London Symphony concert) invited the listener, with the aid of Viktor Rydberg's lyrics, into a twilit landscape of 'foaming lake', 'sighing forests' and 'moss and heather', while Grieg's 'Haugtussa' song-cycle, to words by Arne Garborg, virtually transformed a lonely, living Norway into sound. At her Wigmore Hall concert, Solveig Kringelborn stepped into that Norway with a vocal and dramatic conviction that I do not expect to find soon equaled. Like Munch's train smoke, she became part of her landscape.

But the Nordic love affair with landscape is a matter of detail as well as compositional patterning: there is a Scandinavian relish for the minutia -- for the simple building materials -- of nature that revealed itself everywhere at the festival and tied its programme to the past. The joy in stones that animated the display of modern Danish jewellery by Agnete Dinesen once helped design the small medieval churches of that craftswoman's native country, while the wood used by Icelander Hulda Hakon in a mixed media composition was once curved by Viking boatwrights and painted over with religious images by early Nordic Christians. That Ms. Hakon was featured in 'Border Crossings' among the artists, while Ms. Dinesen displayed her work among the craftsmen in a Barbican foyer is immaterial: Scandinavian art admits no pigeon-holing, and that is one secret of its vitality. Those who were moved by The Seventh Seal in the Barbican cinema would do well to reflect that it was inspired by painted panelling in an old Swedish church, a source acknowledged by Bergman in the name of the play from which he developed his script: Wood Painting.