The World is Leaking – and Art Picks Up the Drops

»The world is leaking« – the phrase echoed through the opening performance of the Bergen International Festival, an event that traditionally begins with a spectacle. This year was no exception. South African visual artist and director William Kentridge unfolded his operatic work The Great Yes, The Great No as a sensual and orchestrated flow of images, voices, music, and movement.

Personally, the pieces truly fell into place four days later when Kentridge, this year’s artist in residence, presented his second work

A South African choir and an ensemble of cello, accordion, percussion, and piano filled the stage, while figures of Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Josephine Baker, and André Breton – the pope of Surrealism – drifted in and out without pause.

The Great Yes, The Great No tells a story of refugees and border crossings – but also of Surrealism’s detours and survival. A Schubert sonata collided with Charleston and French café music from the 1940s.

Here at Norway’s largest cultural festival, with the Queen herself in attendance at Grieghallen, you were either captivated as Kentridge breathed life into the dust of the past and exposed human folly – or you were left longing for form and structure. Personally, the pieces truly fell into place four days later when Kentridge, this year’s artist in residence, presented his second work.

A naked beauty in a white room

Ryoji Ikeda is world-renowned for his digital soundscapes and binary bombardments. But when Ensemble Modern performed three of the Japanese composer’s acoustic works from the period 2020–2023, a different side of his artistry emerged – ascetic, exposed, and vulnerable. In the program notes, Ikeda writes with rare candor that he had to learn the language of classical music from scratch – and adds, without sentimentality, that he may never have truly mastered it. He calls it an artistic undressing. This external position in relation to the classical tradition may be one of the reasons the concert in the Kode Museum’s minimalist white cube felt so remarkably different. Not as resistance, but as a radical form of concentration.

In Mirror [one for two], two musicians stood on either side of a long table, reading from a single page of music facing opposite directions, passing each other in a quiet, choreographed encounter. The music was sparse, almost surgical in its use of silence and subtle tonal shifts.

Ryoji Ikeda managed to translate his digital principles into acoustic micro-movements without losing his aesthetic

Prism for String Nonet was based on a spectral principle, where a mass of sound is split like light through a prism. The bow strokes were extremely controlled, and Ensemble Modern let each tone unfold with an almost scientific objectivity. The piece spanned the full register from F1 to C6, but without any linear or thematic development. It felt like listening to colors being carved out of silence. Reflection, written in 7/8, created a tension that never resolved. Like a sonic echo chamber, the work displaced its own phrases and balanced the asymmetrical.

The concert, simply titled Music for strings, became a study in reduced beauty, where Ryoji Ikeda – through a radical gesture – managed to translate his digital principles into acoustic micro-movements without losing his aesthetic.

From Grieg’s piano to Flagstad’s ghost

Once again, this year’s festival offered tragedy, pop, and opera high up in the mountains. And in the peaceful villa neighborhood where both Kygo and another Norwegian superstar DJ live – at Edvard Grieg’s home, Troldhaugen, beautifully situated between nature and history – there was music. At Grieg’s own piano, Christian Ihle Hadland performed Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major in Johann Sebastian Bach’s solo piano arrangement. The balance between the lively Italian baroque and the German tightness was both cheeky and beautiful.

So, what does it sound like when a deceased singer performs »live«?

Also noteworthy was the Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish-American composer Nikolai Medtner’s Sonata in C Minor, Op. 25 No. 1 »Fairy Tale«, which shifted between Rachmaninoff-like dramatic outbursts and mysterious calm. But in Grieg’s Lyriske stykker (Lyrical Pieces), the articulation felt anonymous, and the Nordic moods sentimental. In Robert Schumann’s late Gesänge der Frühe – written shortly before the composer’s breakdown – the enigmatic tone colors were absent. And Grieg’s piano is, after all, a fine instrument. Mischa Levitzki’s Valse amour exuded the chic salons of the 1920s.

So, what does it sound like when a deceased singer performs »live«? In Håkonshallen, Kirsten Flagstad’s (1895–1962) voice once again floated through the space – retrieved from old recordings and surrounded by 16 living voices from the Edvard Grieg Vocal Ensemble and Valen Vocal Ensemble. Her iconic interpretations of Grieg, Wagner, and Handel were put in dialogue with newly composed a cappella works. The bold project – staged by conductor Stephen Higgins and sound designer Max Pappenheim – worked best in the sacred passages like Solveig’s Song. Often, the distance between the recorded and the live became downright spooky. »Dido’s Lament« demonstrated that the attempt to summon the unattainable through technological magic is not just an artistic achievement – but also an emotional risk zone.

Moon Bag is not a concert, but a flowing, acoustic landscape or stage I wanted to live in

Instead, I was captivated by a strange voice in this year’s festival exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall. In Tori Wrånes’ installation Moon Bag, which the artist herself describes as »a living stage or an endless concert«, sound is not just an accompanying element to the oversized sculptural figures – it is the pulse of the work.

A voice sings, at once organic and synthetic, while the room is saturated with psychoacoustic resonance – a fusion of soothing hum and electronic trembling unease. Moon Bag is not a concert, but a flowing, acoustic landscape or stage I wanted to live in.

The ruins of art and the echoes of revolution

William Kentridge’s second work at the festival, Oh to Believe in Another World, was a cinematic staging of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. The visual layer, projected on a large screen behind the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, unfolded as a kaleidoscopic journey through Soviet history – from the October Revolution in 1917 to Stalin’s death in 1953, the year this symphony premiered. In Kentridge’s mash-up of stop-motion animation, cardboard figures, and archival footage, Shostakovich appears as a conductor of revolution, waving a red flag.

Instead, Kentridge opens poetic fissures in the surface – as if to remind us that art cannot save us, but it can show us the ruins

As I listened to the symphony – its emotional range rendered exquisitely by the Norwegian orchestra – I recalled something Kentridge mentioned during an artist talk in Bergen: that he early on realized he wasn’t a good painter. Instead, he said, he works in close dialogue with the material and insists on creating with the body – not with the head.

It struck me that this approach also permeates The Great Yes, The Great No, the opening performance from four days earlier, which was still echoing within me. When Kentridge blends historical facts, fictional characters, and imaginative visual worlds in his distinctive, ambiguous, and often absurd style, he moves fearlessly into the political darkness – without giving us definitive answers. He merely states: »The world is leaking«. Yes, indeed, the world is leaking. Instead, Kentridge opens poetic fissures in the surface – as if to remind us that art cannot save us, but it can show us the ruins. It’s not understanding, but sensation that lies at the core of an aesthetic where the political and the poetic seep into the body like slow-moving water. I felt it as Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony passed through my own body as never before.

Bergen International Festival, Norway, May 21 – June 4

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek