Concert: Between Dovre and Blaafjellet

A four-handed journey through Grieg, Ibsen and Agathe Backer Grøndahl

Cobalt was extracted from this mountain for almost two hundred years. The colour was ground, melted, refined and sent out into the world - into European handicrafts, porcelain and painting. The blue colour from Modum became something beautiful elsewhere, while the miners lived and worked here, in the darkness below. There's something in that image that won't let go.

The mountain always contains something we can't see from the outside. Grieg knows that. Ibsen knows that. And Agathe Backer Grøndahl's I Blaafjellet knows it perhaps best of all. The suite doesn't go outside the mountain, it goes inside. Night, an enchanted hall, a luring song, mountain climbing and dancing: that which lives in the darkness and refuses to go away.

It is perhaps no coincidence that this concert is being held here. Ibsen, Grieg and Backer Grøndahl all told their stories about the landscape, the myths and the forces that draw people inwards. At Blaafarveværket, they meet in a space that already bears the colour, work and darkness of the mountains.

Peer Gynt runs away from everything: from the village, from shame, from love, from responsibility, from himself. He imagines himself larger than life, rides through mountains and fantasies, allows himself to be lured by trolls, power and adventure, and finally ends up where all great life lies end: at home, face to face with what he never managed to be.

In this concert performance, Edvard Grieg's iconic Peer Gynt music meets Agathe Backer Grøndahl's enigmatic piano suite In Blaafjellet. Two pianists, four hands, one story that moves between Norwegian mountain nature, adventure, darkness, humour and the existential question everyone knows, but most people prefer to postpone.

Monica Tomescu-Rohde and Shannon Wettstein Sadler weave together music, narrative and visual moods in a performance where the familiar is given new light. Grieg's melodies carry Peer's outer journey, while Backer Grøndahl's music opens up the mountain's inner space: night, troll hall, luring, rock climbing and dancing.

This is not Peer Gynt as a dusty national symbol. This is Peer Gynt as a human being: restless, brilliant, cowardly, funny, selfish, vulnerable and recognisable. A man who wants to be himself, but spends his whole life running away from it.

Mellom Dovre og Blaafjellet is a vivid concert experience about mountains, fantasy, self-deception and homecoming, and about the question that ultimately awaits us all: What's left when the stories we've told about ourselves no longer hold up? Connecting Traditions is a Norwegian-American piano duo with Monica Tomescu-Rohde and Shannon Wettstein Sadler. Since 2017, Monica has worked to highlight the music of underrepresented composers through the concert series Female Tracks in Music History and the multimedia project Fanny's Year. Shannon has given more than 450 world premieres and performed at venues such as Lincoln Center and the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series. Together they create concerts where music, story and landscape meet.