Pre-Christmas atmosphere in Store studio with Christmas stories, fairy tales and symphonic Christmas music.
Iselin Shumba, narrator
Gisle Kverndokk: An old-fashioned Christmas Eve, suite (first performance)
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Märchenbilder
Chloé van Soeterstède, conductor
KORK invites you to both a traditional, but also slightly different Christmas concert. The music is instrumental and symphonic, but still linked to Christmas traditions and moods. In the center is the first performance of the Norwegian composer Gisle Kverndokk's suite An old-fashioned Christmas Eve, which again took its title from a well-known Christmas story by fairy tale collector Peter Christen Asbjørnsen.
In the story, we meet a lieutenant who reluctantly has to spend Christmas Eve in his lodgings in Kristiania, with two "old maids". This becomes a setting for many stories, which are told in front of the fireplace in Tollbodgaten, where both children, young and old let themselves be carried away by stories about goblins and ghosts. The lieutenant finally gets a nice, old-fashioned Christmas Eve.
We still have to tell stories to each other, and maybe like in the old days, when the stories passed from mouth to mouth. The evening's narrator is not sitting in front of the fireplace, but in the legendary Store studio, a room that has given the Norwegian people a Christmas atmosphere for over 70 years. And best of all: The stories are accompanied by Christmassy orchestral music, music that lets the imagination run wild, played by the whole country's Christmas Orchestra!
The concert is for the whole family, but is probably best suited for ages five and up.