[ May 2019 ] A friend of mine had told me that the opera house in Oslo is worth a look, so before going there we booked tickets for a performance.
Everything in Norway is very expensive, but the tickets were fairly reasonable.
Our seats were on the upper gallery and the ticket cost 645 krone each (£60, €67, $75).
The programme was “La Cenerentola (Cinderella)” by Rossini.
I did not know this opera, but because the story is so famous, I had thought it would be easy for us to follow.
On the day, we went to the tourist office and asked how to get the opera house and found that it was close to the centre of the town on the fjord.
A part of the outer wall is a slope and people can walk up there to the rooftop of the building, which is the main feature of the design, but because the performance were starting early at 6 pm, we went in first.
As well as the Oslo airport, here, too, a lot of wooden materials were used inside and it looked nice and stylish.
The interesting thing was that we could see the people walking higher up outside of the window.
Those who were there to see the opera were mostly dressed up a little and they were having a talk with a glass of white wine in their hands.
Through the foyer, we could go out to the waterfront and we were surprised to see some people jumping into the water.
For the locals, the end of May seemed already summer.
They were selling the programmes, which was partly in English, for 50 krone, which was cheap considering prices in this country, so we bought one for our memory.
The auditorium has 1,364 seats, apparently, and it was modern, too.
There was a kind of catwalk surrounding the orchestra box.
Our seats were positioned quite high, but they were in the first row, so we could see the performance well.
I did not know any of the musics of La Cenerentola, but they had made it an enjoyable comedy, which was a bit like a pantomime at Christmas time, so we did not get bored at all.
There were a few moments that we actually laughed, for example, when those chorus men pretended to be the angels in Raffaello’s painting,“Sistine Madonna”.
We really enjoyed it.
First of all, they made Cinderella as a modern time cleaner.
She was suddenly pulled into a fairy tale and enjoyed her role, but just before reaching the happiest moment with the prince, all the performers of the fairy tale disappeared and she was forced to come back to reality, so in fact it was sort of a sad ending.
We got out of the opera house at around 9:30 pm.
It was still bright and the light was characteristic of northern Europe.
We went up the slope outside to the roof.
The design is really cool.
The only thing was that the floor was not even and had some differences in level, so we had to be careful not to trip over.
The design of this opera house was chosen through a competition and the winner was a Norwegian architecture company.
It was completed in 2007 and in 2008, they won a prize in the World Architecture Festival and in 2009, the Mies Van Der Rohe Award in the EU Prize for the Contemporary Architecture.
