Celebrating the history of music

The Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra is honoring the history of symphonic music in the city by reviving a 100-year-old concert program.

Back when the musicians in Kristiansand were hired by the theater to provide live music for crackling silent films, they also held their first symphony concerts. The very first one took place in February 1920, the year after the Kristiansand City Orchestra was established. It is the program from this concert that the KSO will perform in April. The works are Edvard Grieg’s concert overture “Autumn” and the Holberg Suite, Johan Svendsen’s “I fjol gjætt’e gjeitinn,” and Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 104, “London.”

 

ANNIVERSARY CONCERT: In April, the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra will perform the program from the city’s first symphony concert in 1920. All tickets are available at a special anniversary price of NOK 100.

Back then

Principal, music teacher, and local historian Frank Høgberg knows the history well.

“The program emphasized Norwegian music and consists of pieces that are still performed today. But back then, they weren’t able to rehearse the program with the entire orchestra and got by with a sub-program for strings only,” says Høgberg, who also has some thoughts on what the performance and sound might have been like in 1920.

“It’s hard to imagine what it sounded like back then—it’s pure speculation—but with a full wind section and only five or six first violins, it would probably sound rather thin to today’s audience,” says Høgberg.

He adds that Kristiansand also lacked the expertise to provide training on all the instruments. The musicians were sent to Oslo to receive instruction in both the bassoon and the oboe.

While most people could hear the musicians providing live music for silent films at the theater, symphony concerts attracted a slightly different audience.

– A while back, I used the title “To the Delight of the Whole City.” But that was probably a slight exaggeration. Of course, it was the wealthy who attended the concerts. But the city was rich—in the sense that it had both a bishop’s seat and a large military contingent, and it was people from the church and the military, merchants, and wholesalers who primarily took advantage of the offerings.

 

The Story

The symphonic history of Kristiansand began in 1911, when local native Gunnar Abrahamsen returned from Gothenburg after training as an organist and serving as a violinist with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Abrahamsen was hired as organist at the Cathedral and was the driving force behind what would become the Kristiansand City Orchestra. The city’s symphonic history will be chronicled in a separate publication, penned by cultural writer Emil Otto Syvertsen.

 

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