Oslo/Berlin: Trond Reinholdtsen receives TONO's new challenger award for the project The Norwegian Opera. – An incredible insult, says the prize winner in a comment.
/ 02/11/2011 / codexReinholdtsen receives the award because The Norwegian Opera is both a declaration of love for the history of opera and an institutionally critical and problematizing work.
The award winner says the following in a comment on receiving TONO's challenger award: – It was an incredible insult. I feel very established and believe that it is everyone else who is challenging me. In that sense, this was a wake-up call.
Reinholdtsen was presented with the award in connection with the premiere of Vinge/Müller/Reinholdtsen's production of John Gabriel Borkman by Ibsen at the Volksbühne-Prater in Berlin.
The Challenger Award is newly established, and could hardly have found a more obvious winner: Just when we thought that experimental, outrageous contemporary music had disappeared into the (pluralistic) heat, Trond Reinholdtsen throws himself into the ring and establishes the one-man project The Norwegian Opera, in a small apartment in the Old Town of Oslo, modeled after Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.
From this base, he follows with the utmost seriousness and at a high-strung production pace all the notes and unnotes of avant-gardism, like a kind of jack-of-allopera-trades.