Festival Programme 2026 35% off with ultiMATE

Autumn Caravan

Gisle Kverndokk I Adriana Hölszky

Saturday 12 September, at 13:00–14:15 | 16:00–17:15

Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo

160–350 kr

Showings and tickets

Saturday 12/09

13:00–14:15

Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo (Main stage)

160–350 kr

Buy ticket

16:00–17:15

Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo (Main stage)

160–350 kr

Buy ticket

Twelve percussionists surround you. Then a voice begins to sing.

Sound impulses travel through the room like streams of energy. Drums, metal plates, cymbals, tubular bells, tam-tams, gongs, flutes and organ pipes give Adriana Hölszky's Karawane its colour and texture.

Kverndokk brings a more intimate world into the circle: song cycles written across four decades, rearranged and expanded for a larger formation, with singers and piano at the centre, surrounded by both percussionists and audience. New transitions bind the songs together and bring them into dialogue with Hölszky's music.

The songs draw on Scandinavian poetry, bringing autumn, rivers, solitude, mortality and then new life into the room. They give words to an existential landscape that Karawane opens as sound: movement, impermanence, and the feeling of being part of something larger than oneself.

Programme

Adriana Hölszky Karawane (1989/90) Reflexionen über den Wanderklang für 12 Schlagzeuger [Reflections on Wandering Sound for 12 percussionists]

Gisle Kverndokk
Songs from:

Sanger til dikt av Liv Holtskog [Songs to poems by Liv Holtskog] (1987)

Sanger om høst og vinter: En nordisk sangsyklus [Songs of Autumn and Winter: A Nordic Song Cycle] (2021)

Tre sanger [Three Songs] for mezzo-soprano, baritone and piano (2021)

Syngende natt: Kjærlighetsvalser og en tango til dikt av Harald Sverdrup [Singing Night: Love Waltzes and a Tango to poems by Harald Sverdrup] (2023)

Så kort ein sommar menneska har [So brief a summer we humans have] (2016), standalone song

Want to know more?

Adriana Hölszky on Karawane: "The caravan, as a composed wilderness, seeks to make dream and reality, the audible and the inaudible, separation and connection, distance and closeness, felt at once."
One of the lines running through this year's festival is noise. In the 20th century, percussion helped loosen the old boundary between tone and noise, opening music to impact, friction and physical energy. Hölszky enters this field on her own terms: sound as heat, transformation and wandering force.
Gisle Kverndokk’s songs are set to texts by nine Scandinavian poets, from Norwegian nature poetry and post-war modernism to Swedish and Finland-Swedish modernist voices.
Singers from KHiO's Opera Academy and percussionists from the Norwegian Academy of Music share the stage with SISU and Pinquins, two established Norwegian percussion trios.