National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

Editor's Note: This summer Nat Geo Music made our annual visit to Norway's stellar Førde Folk Music Festival - which took place just weeks before Anders Bering Breivik's senseless and tragic acts of terror in Oslo. So, in solidarity with the people of Norway, we sent special correspondent Evangeline Kim back to Norway to cover this year's annual Folkelarm festival, which took place in Oslo in the last weekend of September - and to once again experience the true face of Norway: gracious, welcoming, tolerant, generous and unbowed by terror.

Read Part One Here

View Gallery

Folkelarm Saturday Night Showcases:

Upstairs in the amphitheater, one of Norway's promising dancers, Hallgrim Hansegård, appeared in a collaborative music-dance project with the accomplished classical violinist and Hardanger fiddler, Ragnhild Hemsing. Their project attempts to tread the line between folk and classical music and concludes with contemporary abstraction. Mr. Hansegård's folk-dancing prowess as a leaping, somersaulting Halling dancer is admirable - high-kicking a hat off a stick and slapstick antics balancing on a rolling milk container. The finale of their act where he twists his body into contorted puzzles to Ms. Hemsing's abstract music would have interested the late painter, Emanuel Vigeland, whose eerie mausoleum walls in Oslo are covered with bizarre studies of the human form.

Two of Norway's eminent musicians, Nils Økland, the classical violinist and fiddler (whom we also saw in another incarnation as a feisty rock fiddler with a Ragnarok tribute during the Folkelarm Awards), and Sigbjørn Apeland, organist and pianist, who both served as directors of the Ole Bull Academy, have recorded one of the most beautiful CDs on the international markets: "Lysøen - Hommage à Ole Bull" (ECM). Their all-too-brief performance of selections from the album was one of the great connoisseurship highpoints of the festival. With profound focus that held the hall in rapture, Mr. Økland shifted between the violin and fiddle in dream-like sequences and at one point tapped his instrument with his bow in shimmering staccato, while Mr. Apeland's harmonium accompaniment swelled and receded in melancholy harmonies.

Downstairs the action was equally intense with more folk acts. Vrang is an emerging trio of excellent young folk fiddlers. Its inspirations are rooted in broader knowledge of Norway's differing regional folk music traditions. But the three dare to weave in other influences from bluegrass to jazz, so much so that one of the singer-fiddlers, Tuva Færden accompanied the group by scraping strands of beads on a washboard, Zydeco-style, in one song. They are also known to mix media in their work, including literature, spoken word, and dance.

Sweden's Navarra, a pep-filled and cheerful quartet of singer, fiddler, keyboard-player, and percussionist, has a newer folk sound topped with pop, jazz, and a driving rock-edged energy, meant to attract different kinds of audiences. Although their first few songs sped along in similar tempos, the band suddenly switched to a simple waltz melody that was their most convincing song and brought out the more finessed qualities in each musician.

Norway has a grand tradition of women folk singers and Folkelarm 2011 featured the beautiful Camilla Granlien from Gudbrandsdalen with a riveting stage presence and a clear bell-like soprano. "I look upon myself as a storyteller that passes on both old and new stories. People of every age like to be told a tale." And judging from the rapt, happy audience, she is right. With such a strong and perfect-pitched voice, she can easily carry a concert a capella, yet for her last two songs she invited onstage the double bass-player, Jo Fougner Skaansar, who wove rhythmic, rumbling textures to her silken vocals.

After seeing Finland's Arto Järvelä in action with Nordik Tree, we had just one more opportunity to see this splendid fiddler, composer, and multi-instrumentalist in solo performance. He is breath-taking in his complex cross-tunings, harmonies, and fiddle mastery. One could spot many of Norway's top Hardanger fiddlers in the audience who were fascinated by his jaunty playing of both the fiddle and a Finnish nyckelharper, as he occasionally gently sang along. Mr. Järvelä is frequently described as "the busiest man in Finnish folk music," having released many solo albums and contributed to more than 80 albums, He also plays an amazing array of instruments including mandolin, octave mandolin, kantele, and the ancient jouhikko. By all means, try to see him live, but if not, there is his marvelous CD "Arto Järvelä Plays Fiddle Vol. 2: Avovireessä/ Cross-tuned."

The Malmö-based fusion group Faela, with musicians from Chile, Argentina, Sweden, and Bosnia, was the big surprise Folkelarm finale in the amphitheater. The steaming room was jumping with delirious dancers who so clearly enjoyed the band's riotous mix of Balkan and Latin beats, with heavy doses of funky ska-reggae bass lines and jazz horns. All the introspective aspects of Nordic folk music seemed to vanish with this thumping band who thought nothing of all collapsing on the floor as they continued to play their instruments, only to hop back up, while urging the crowds to sing along and wave in unison. Their concert lasted a solid hour and although it was late, no one was tired. The band is destined to gain fans on the international world music festival circuit.

During Folkelarm's final reception where we tasted the delicious Norwegian Bacalau baked with cod, potatoes, spicy tomato sauce, and piquant olives, the Chair of FolkOrg, Maria Høgetveit Berg, announced that Folkelarm would forego a 2012 showcase edition. The organization needs focus-time for an evaluation period and to explore much-needed funding possibilities.

Ms. Berg later stated, "As chair of the organization that arranges Folkelarm, I am proud of the arrangement and impressed by the artists, their high artistic quality, intensity and presence on stage. I am glad though that we have decided to wait until 2013 to put on a new showcase. We need to find some partners and our artists need to renew themselves and new ones to get up there."

The Saga of Gamalost:

Right before attending Folkelarm, we heard some intriguing news about the famous "Viking Viagra" cheese known as Gamalost that we first sampled 3 years earlier during the Førde Festival. Professor Siv Skeie and her team at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, located in Aas, have discovered that the cheese has beneficial properties for lowering blood pressure without the side-effects associated with prescription medication.

We met with Professor Skeie and PhD candidate Tahir Mahmood Qureshi at the Aas-based university, where they gave us an overview of their research findings. They now have conclusive evidence that a very small quantity of Gamalost each day is helpful in lowering high blood pressure through its peptide action, which is most potent at days 10 - 20 in the ripening process. They are furthering their Gamalost research as part of the university's "Healthy Cheese Project," headed by Professor Skeie, to examine its potential benefits on digestion. Professor Skeie will soon officially present the exciting Gamalost health news findings to the public in Norway, and we can only imagine how even more scarce this wonder will become.

The Tine brand cheese is produced in small quantities in Vik and is unavailable outside of Norway. It's was originally an artisanal folk cheese in early Western Norway's fjord mountain dairies and is now produced through strict hygienic factory process. Today Gamalost is mostly appreciated by older Norwegians who swear by its health-giving properties. The acquired taste of Gamalost is probably the most intense "umami" 5th taste imaginable as it ripens. Often served with butter or sweet fruit jams, Gamalost was described as far back as the 11th century in Iceland's "Snorre Saga."

Oslo's Norsk Folkemuseum and the Viking Ships Museum:

We thought we arrived in enough time to explore Oslo's two historical cultural museums, the Norsk Folkemuseum and the Viking Ships Museum, as prelude background to Folkelarm in a day, but found this was far too short. Any Folkelarm attendee would gain immeasurable appreciation of the showcase festival by visiting both museums over a full two days.

The Norsk Folkemuseum is the oldest open air museum in the world and largest museum of cultural history featuring Norway, founded in 1894. It aims to show how people lived since the 1500's through the present, and represents different regions of in Norway, different time periods, as well as differences between town and country, and social classes.

The outdoor area covers 140,000 square meters, including The Royal Farm over approximately 2 million square meters. It holds 155 buildings including the stupendous medieval Gol stave church built in 1200 - perched atop a hill, farm houses from various rural districts in Norway and the Old Oslo Town with the Apartment Building - Wessels gate 15 presenting interior styles from the 20th and 21st centuries, and even Sami tents. During the summer months and weekends, weather permitting, the museum presents outdoor concerts and dances representative of all of Norway's regional styles.

The magnificent indoor collections in buildings covering 27,000 square meters, feature Norwegian folk art, folk dress, church art, Sami culture, old toys and temporary exhibits, such as the current historical color photographs show. What was missing, we wondered, as we walked through the silent exhibit rooms?

The ethnographic aspects of the visual splendors, we felt, would be greatly enhanced by regional and appropriate period music. The Sami culture exhibit would be enlivened with some joik music; the old toys section might be brightened with some Grieg or Ole Bull music; and needless to say all the traditional folk costuming from different parts of the country has specific associated music. It's to be hoped that meaningful collaborations between Folkelarm and even the Førde Festival will develop. Surely many of the museum's 250,000 annual visitors would enjoy both festival events, and festival goers would gain a greater sense of Norway's cultural history.

A five minute walk away from the Norsk Folkemuseum we entered Norway's phenomenal Viking Ships Museum. The immense sense of scale and majesty one gets in the presence of the 3 main grave ship attractions is indescribable: the archeological finds of the Oseberg ship (22 meters long, built between 815 - 820 AD and used as a grave ship for a woman of high rank who died in 834 AD); the Gokstad ship (24 meters long, built around 890 AD and the burial ship for a Viking chieftain); and the Tune ship (ca 900 AD that also contained the remains of a man of high rank).

There are side exhibits of shards, materials, and objects found buried within the ships that the Vikings believed important for afterlife: rich textiles and clothing, tools for the weaving craft, furniture, chests, and containers, kitchen utensils and tableware, rattles (for music possibly), agricultural tools, weapons, and ceremonial sledges. On the second floor are exhibits of the skeletons found in the ships.

Not too surprisingly, as we walked over and around Oslo's opera house exterior up to the rooftop, with its powerful architecture of vast sloping, scaled planes of marble and granite, measuring a total 38,000 square meters, we were reminded of Viking Age glory, still alive today in Norway's cultural psyche.