Festival Programme 2026 35% off with ultiMATE

Opening Concert: Magic Fantastic

Oslo-Filharmonien I Øyvind Torvund I Kristine Tjøgersen I Igor Stravinsky

Thursday 10 September, at 19:00–20:30

150–695 kr

Imagination as necessity

We have never quite learned to live together — with one another, with other creatures, with the machines we build and the stories we inherit. The tensions are old, but right now they feel unusually close: loud, pressing and impossible to look away from. A concert cannot fix them. But it can take the materials of this same world — forests, machines, creatures and tales — and make room for them to meet differently. Strangely, luminously.

The Oslo Philharmonic opens Ultima 2026 with two Norwegian premieres: Øyvind Torvund's Two Pieces for Orchestra and Electronics and Kristine Tjøgersen's Wolpertinger, alongside Stravinsky's Le chant du rossignol. All three works reimagine the orchestra as a fantasy machine, drawing the listener into its inner workings.

Tjøgersen has an uncanny gift for making orchestral instruments sound like animals. In Wolpertinger, she turns into a taxidermist. The animal is no longer one creature, but many: koala, flying fox, Tasmanian devil, hummingbird and others, stitched into a single orchestral body.

Stravinsky's nightingale meets a different kind of creature, built from brass and clockwork. Said to sing better and more brilliantly than nature itself, this artificial bird turns song into fairy-tale music and machine music at once. Stravinsky's lines are highly ornamented, its rhythms precise and ticking; some dissonances delicate, others hard and almost enamelled.

Torvund's music lives in a different forest — Iggy Pop's "neon forest", to borrow the line Torvund has made his own. His Two Pieces for Orchestra and Electronics is populated by howling wolves and musical ghosts, from Wagner to 1980s synth glitter, from vintage science-fiction soundtracks to easy-listening reverie. Old orchestral dreams are plugged into other currents — naïve, sentimental, and profoundly alive.

Programme

Øyvind Torvund Two Pieces for Orchestra and Electronics (2026), Norwegian premiere
Igor Stravinsky Le chant du rossignol (1919)
Kristine Tjøgersen Wolpertinger (2026), Norwegian premiere

Want to know more?

The Wolpertinger is a mythical creature said to inhabit the alpine forests of southern Germany. Wings, antlers, fangs and a tail are attached to the body of a small mammal.
In H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale The Nightingale, the Emperor of China is moved to tears by the bird’s song. One day, a mechanical bird appears at court, jewelled and dazzling, and the emperor lets himself be enchanted by it. When he later falls ill, he understands that only the real nightingale can save him.
"In a sound landscape, no sound is illogical. So much can happen," says Kristine Tjøgersen. "The world opens up when you listen.
Øyvind Torvund on the contrasts in his music. "Completely opposite perspectives interest me because I believe there is a lot happening around and beneath the ordinary musical framework, a lot of unconscious forces to be explored."
The electronics in Torvund’s new work were developed at IRCAM/Centre Pompidou in Paris and are realised live in concert by IRCAM’s sound designers and technicians.