Notes from Trondheim 4: Freddie Mercury’s surprise appearance

The Trondheim Festival of Chamber Music is now officially øver. The festival’s stand has vanished from the foyer of the Hotel Rica Nidelven, replaced by one advertising a Formidlings Konferansen, whatever that is. Now the hotel, where all the musicians have lived, practised and drunk their way through countless minibars in the past week, has that lonely atmosphere of a concert hall after the crowd has gone home.

There’s a lot to catch up on from the last few days. Firstly, the results of the Chamber Music Competition. The number one spot was nabbed by French ensemble Trio Paul Klee, whose cellist Tristan Cornut was the most outstanding musician I heard in the comp – a beautifully free bowing technique and effortless true intonation. Second prize – and audience prize – went to the Fournier Trio, whose Australian cellist Pei-Jee Ng won the Young Performers Award back in 2001. Third was taken by the Atanassov Trio, whose pianist Pierre-Kaloyann Atanassov was another standout, with wonderful perlé (I was reminded of Radu Lupu) and a terrific sense of rhythm.

A few hours after the announcement came the closing concert – a marathon in which almost all the musicians to perform at the festival took part. The program was, as Keats would say, a bit o’erlong. There were enough performances to constitute two concerts; jamming them all together was too much of a good thing. Still, the highs were very high: pianist Susan Tomes and violist Kim Kashkashian in a fiery rendition of de Falla canciones; the Telcea Quartet playing arrangements of French popular songs (Piaf et al.). Then Paul and Brett Dean gave a chamber music masterclass in their performance of a few extracts from Bruch’s Eight Pieces for Viola, Clarinet and Piano. The pair had total fusion of ensemble, without ever playing it safe – you could tell these guys had grown up together. It really felt like one consciousness producing all the lines of melody.

The final bash was topped off by a surprise number – a hair-raising rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody performed by the Telcea Quartet, Paul Dean and David Hansen. All wore Freddie Mercury moustaches, and Hansen screamed the climax in his piercing countertenor while tearing off his T-shirt to reveal a clump of Murcury-esque chest hair. Squeals of delight from the crowd.

Hansen and the other Australians ruled the roost at this year’s festival, and it’s odd that I heard more Australian musicians here than at the Musica Viva Festival in Sydney earlier this year. It would be easy to scream cultural cringe, but I think this would be unfair: festival audiences want to hear world-class performers they haven’t heard before – which is fair enough – and the most unfussy way of doing this is to import them.

At the unofficial festival afterparty (OK, a piss-up in someone’s hotel room) I finally confessed my fanboydom to violinist Anthony Marwood. I treasure his recordings of Dvorak and Stravinsky, and his playing at the Festival was as intuitively beautiful as ever. Marwood told me he’s coming out to Australia a few times next year – to play the Adès concerto with the Sydney Symphony and on a tour with Musica Viva – and I recommend catching him live if you can.

The rain has been politely holding off for the past week while the Festival was running. Typical Norwegian restraint. But now it’s bucketing down in freezing drops, making goosebumps on the water of the Nidelven outside my window. I’m genuinely sad this week of music is over – I would have gladly stayed for another – so I’m going to find consolation, Wittgenstein-style, in the Scandinavian wilderness. If I manage to avoid being mauled by a moose or falling off a fjord, I’ll be back to blog about the Gramophone Awards in London in two weeks. Until then, farvel, adjø and har det bra!