Welcome to the official opening of the 7th edition of the world’s northernmost classical music festival, the Arctic Chamber Music Festival 2024!

Meet the festival artists  and Arktisk Filharmoni at the historic venue Huset, full of memories and hidden stories from Svalbard.

Together with a group of brilliant festival artists and Arktisk Filharmoni, we will give you an evening to remember; this year you’ll meet festival artists Bjarte Eike and members from Barokksolistene, Soetkin Baptist and Yegor Shevtsov, six singers from Voksenåsen and musicians from Arktisk Filharmoni. The programme for the opening will be chamber music, beautiful songs and a brand new mini opera!

PRE TALK FROM 18:30: Composer Rachel Peters and Royce Vavrek will give a pre-talk about the opera half an hour before the concert starts.

Three Amputators is an opera-in-progress from composer Rachel J. Peters and librettist Royce Vavrek after the story “The Three Army Surgeons” by the Brothers Grimm. The opera tells of three travelling doctors who seek lodging for a night, offering the establishment’s innkeeper a demonstration of their unbelievable skills: They can cut out parts of their own bodies only to reattach them later with the aid of a proprietary salve.  After one removes a hand, another their heart, and the third their eyeballs, an enigmatic cat appears on the scene to dine on the flesh and throw the course of the story into disarray.  This is a contemporary interpretation of one of the Grimm’s most eccentric of tales. It is gruesome, but also very silly with lots of jokes, at least in our version! If you are looking for a sweet Disney-style classic, this is not it!

“What speaks to me about this story in terms of a moral is that the characters spend all their resources fixing things that aren’t broken while ignoring what is broken. That feels very relevant to our contemporary world”. – Rachel Peters

Musicians:

Arktisk Filharmoni
Bjarte Eike, Per Buhre, Steven Player and Hans Knut Sveen from Barokksolistene
Soetkin Baptist, soprano
Yegor Shevtsov, piano
Helgi Reynisson, baritone
Markus Djuve, baritone
Mari Aschehoug, soprano
Sandrine Schau, soprano
Constantina Nicolaou, soprano
Christina Herresthal, mezzosoprano
Sebastiaan Molenaar and Åsmund Moen, percussion
Ben Palmer, conductor
Royce Vavrek, librettist
Rachel Peters, composer

Programme:

Ivan Trevino, Wildlings, percussion duo, Åsmund Moen and Sebastiaan Molenaar from Arktisk Filharmoni

Soetkin Baptist, soprano and Yegor Shevtsov, piano 

Bjarte Eike and members from Barokksolistene

-Intermisson-

Rachel Peters (music) / Royce Vavrek (text), “Three Amputators” – premiere

This concert is part of the festival pass. Pre-talk is included in the ticket.

Huset also hosts a restaurant and bistro which has Nordic flavours and local ingredients in focus. They also have one of Scandinavia´s largest wine cellars with over 15,000 bottles. A piece of Svalbard history within the walls and Arctic nature right outside the door.