‘I was reminded of why short festivals appeal so much’ - Postcard from the Rosendal Chamber Music Festival

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The Rosendal Chamber Music Festival has been on my bucket list ever since I first heard about it. It was launched in 2016 by Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, whose notion of gathering friends together to make music in a spot just remote enough to make getting there feel like an adventure was irresistible. From the UK this involves a flight to Bergen, from where two boats a day take you through the Hardangerfjord to Rosendal, a trip of some 90 minutes. Waiting on the jetty when I arrived was Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson with his three-year-old son, natty in coordinated knitwear: it set the scene and somehow boded well.

The setting was as picturesque as I’d imagined, but it was a rugged and tough beauty: the Folgefonna glaciers in the distance, the immediate backdrop to the music making being waterfall-clothed mountains. It was, if it’s not too far-fetched, a Beethovenian kind of landscape – the sort of place you could imagine him striding through while wrestling with fugal thoughts.

The two main venues couldn’t have appeared more different. There’s the traditional Kvinnherad Church, a 13th-century whitewashed building that is outwardly austere but inside is beautifully decorated, with hand-painted stars on its ceiling from which is suspended an ornamental wooden ship – a timely reminder of the seagoing nature of these peoples. By contrast, there’s the optimistically named Great Hall, which started life as an A-frame barn that only works acoustically thanks to some major audio trickery from a system named Constellation by Meyer Sound of Berkeley, California; I was initially sceptical, but it’s amazing how fast the ear adjusts. Both are part of the Baroniet Rosendal Manor House estate, where Andsnes has been performing for more than two decades. Being able to wander through the ancient rooms and the estate’s perfectly kept rose garden and potager were yet more pleasures given to festival-goers…