Riksscenen in Oslo, Norway with Patti and Alex Lamoureux |
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God dag fra Oslo! Greetings from Oslo! Thursday, April 28th, 2011 was the second performance of the four concert tour of Norway that I´m doing with Patti and Alex Lamoureux. We had a night filled with talk, performing and jamming with the local musicians afterwards. We even had another Canadian in the house for this evening! We performed at Riksscenen in Oslo, a facility that was recently
opened just outside the Oslo downtown core in October 2010. It has an
active schedule of various folk music concerts, sometimes up to as many
as four concerts a week between two small, intimate lounge settings with
great acoustics. We played in one of these small rooms called the Practice Stage ("Prøveshallen") to an enthusiastic audience. Before the concert began,
Patti, along with Norwegian fiddler and composer Britt Pernille Frøholm
and I were invited to participate in a book launch for the 2010 yearbook
on Norwegian Folk music. Anne Hytta, the editor of this book, compiled a
series of articles about Norwegian traditional folk music for the 2010 calendar year. One of the articles in the
book was on the composing of new music in folk music tradition. Our panel discussed
the processes and purposes in composing new folk music and performing it
on stage. Ida Kristine Brammer Habbestad, an Oslo based journalist who
has been writing an article about this topic in the book, led the
interview.
After our evening performance, we
then participated in a jam session with local musicians who had arrived
with instruments in hand, sharing many tunes with each other from
Norway, Shetland, Scotland, Ireland and Canada. We even had another
Canadian in the audience who was originally from Prince Edward Island!
We were pleasantly delighted with the amount of Canadian material we
were able to play with them as well as them sharing tunes that they had
learned from various Canadian groups who have performed in Oslo and
Nowray in the past, namely material from the Quebec group La Bottine
Souriante. We enjoyed the location so much that we went back to attend a show and dance with the Norwegian folk music group Kvarts and special guest fiddlers and violinists The Hemsing Sisters of Oslo to a sold out audience, then proceeded to Alexandria's Bar, Restaurant and Grill for a post-concert jam session.
We would like to publicly thank
Nina Fjeldet of the Thursday night folk music series at Riksscenen for
organizing the concert and the jam sessions for us. More news will come after the Bergen
show on Monday, May 2nd! Check back for news after the Bergen
performance! Enjoy your day where you are and we'll be back in touch!
Musically Yours, Trent
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