GO FEEDBACK: A small town on the coast of Norway three hours from Oslo plays host every year to a world class chamber music festival. MICHAEL DERVANgoes to Risor
THINK OF Norway and you probably think of winter skiing or the dramatic cliff and water vistas of its fjords. There’s the Sognefjord, all of 204km long, and the dramatic perch of the Pulpit Rock, nearly 610 sheer metres above the water, at the Lysefjord near Stavanger. There’s also the Arctic north with its endless summer days, endless winter nights, and the prospect of the aurora borealis.
And the capital, Oslo, has its Edvard Munch Museum, Vigeland Sculpture Park, and a dazzlingly white, iconic new opera house, the roof designed as a public space that you can literally walk all over.
So what’s the special attraction of Risør? It’s a small coastal town, home to less than 4,000 people, located about three hours drive south of Oslo. It’s situated on the Skagerrak, the northern part of the straits which separate the North Sea from the Baltic, and its summer weather is, well, rather Irish, save that it’s that bit warmer and dryer, and the daytime stretches to nearly midnight.
Risør, as I discovered on my first visit there this year, is a bundle of contradictions. It’s a quiet, almost sleepy town, proud to call itself the White Town, because of its proliferation of historic, white wooden houses, now white by law of course, with the non-wooden, yellow police station one of the few exceptions. The Narvesen and 7-Eleven convenience stores which are almost ubiquitous in Norway – Narvesen makes it well beyond the Arctic Circle – are absent.
The setting is beautiful. The harbour fronts on to a group of islands, and in spite of the busy movement of boats of all sizes and shapes – boating is very much a family activity – time seems to slow down. Even the road traffic moves with an artificial restraint imposed by the regular placement of gentle but efficient speed bumps. Cars almost seem to float by, as if purring on a wave.
In summer, there’s plenty of greenery and lots of flowers, too. Roses are very popular, and as you walk around there are festoons of blooms, some of which announce themselves by scent well before you can see them.
Politically, Risør has a unique, left-wing position in Norway. Its directly-elected mayor, Knut Henning Thygesen, is the only Red Party mayor in the country. The Red Party was created in 2007 through the amalgamation of the Workers’ Communist Party and the Red Electoral Alliance.
There’s a small museum which provides a rich photographic history of the town, and an equally small aquarium with a postbox outside promising that items posted there will be franked in an underwater post office – check it out on YouTube.
Three-quarters of the town had to be rebuilt after a fire in 1861, and the rebuilding created streets that were wider (though not wide by 21st century standards) and the streetscapes come close to having a filmset-like, unspoiled unity.
Risør is a place to get out on the sea, to take a walk on one of the many trails, get on your bike, or take the hill up to the Risørflekken (Risør Spot), a large rock painted white to guide sailors, which provides a bird’s-eye view of the town and the sea beyond.
And if you want the freshest of seafood, including sushi, there’s the Risør Fiskemottak, with the trawlers that have landed the fish moored just yards away, and a clutch of harbour-side restaurants in the centre.
For me, however, the special attraction is musical. Since 1991, the town has had its own chamber music festival, started by local man Bernt Lauritz Larsen and viola player Lars Anders Tomter. It’s an even more unlikely enterprise than the Wexford Festival or the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
It attracts the cream of musicians, yet it pays everyone the same flat rate. In Risør, they like the story of having to tell opera star Barbara Hendricks’ agent about this (Hendricks had already agreed to the terms), as well as explaining that there would be no limousine for her, but they could provide a bike (which she happily rode while she was there).
Risør has only one hotel with 30-odd rooms. The six-day festival actually hires a ship and moors it in the harbour to provide accommodation and meals for the musicians. They even bring their own chef.
The main concert venue is the baroque church, built in 1767, plain white with a picket fence on the outside, but gloriously dark and colourful inside, with clouds and a blue sky painted on the ceiling. It seats 400 (more at a pinch), the sound is dryish, but immediate and full. And, with some of the listeners in danger from fiddlers’ elbows, the atmosphere is engagingly if sometimes dangerously intimate.
This year’s festival spread out onto the harbour square (including a dance performance on a stage dangled over the water from a crane), and an outdoor show for young and old on Stangholmen island. It’s not the town’s only festival. The short holiday season – mid-June to mid-August – also brings a Bluegrass Festival, and the Villvin Art and Handcraft Festival, both in July, and the Risør Wooden Boat Festival, which attracts 20,000 visitors in August.
The town is one of those cocooning places, where time and space seem to warp in unexpected ways. And the music-making – watch out for the vocally gymnastic Australian counter-tenor David Hansen (see url.ie/c7yq) – only adds to the special sense of magic.
The Risør Hotel (risorhotel.no) has singles at NOK 1,295 (€167) and doubles at NOK 1,495 (€193), and the guest house Risør Pensjonat (no en -suites) at NOK 600 (€77) and NOK 800 (€103). Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies from London Stansted to Oslo Torp (two hours’ drive away from Risør). SAS (flysas.com), KLM (klm.com), Air France (airfrance.com) and Lufthansa (lufthansa.com) fly to Kristiansand (80 minutes drive away).