New: The season program for 2018/19 has just launched

We are excited to bring to you – our much valued audience - two major new productions and a whole variety of projects, events and initiatives for our new season. As ever, we create Norwegian premieres which present thrilling voices from all over the world while showcasing those from home. We’ll take inspiring music far beyond Bergen, we’ll commission new work, and we plan all kinds of activities for our children and youth.

On the main stage we focus on two operas based on iconic historical writing – from provocative Jules Voltaire and evocative Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Voltaire ́s Candide, banned for its scurrilous poking at religious pomposity and its racy tone, proved just the material for composer Leonard Bernstein – he would have been 100 this year - to seize and shape into his fantastic opera. We ́re thrilled to present its Norwegian premiere. Massenet, however, turned Goethe’s semi-autographical story of introverted, idealistic Werther into one of opera ́s most romantic outpourings, a musical landscape of high emotion.

BNO tours a chamber arrangement of Carmen, and we ́ll also create a new mini-festival - a ‘tapas’ of arias, ensembles and tastes of local produce, while sending singers out on to the fjords, and continuing a major programme of work in the community.

We welcome a superbly diverse roster of artists including Antony McDonald, Thom Southerland, Edgaras Montvidas, Kevin Whately, Anthony Gregory, Randi Stene, Catriona Morison, Beate Mordal, Karen Kamensek and Noluvuyiso Mpofu, and, as ever, we are delighted to continue to share our creative energy with partners Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Edvard Grieg Kor.

Our season for 2018/19 is comprehensive including artists, creative teams and composers both internationally acclaimed and those at the start of their careers. And, in a nod to all things fashionably Nordic, an acknowledgement of just how well opera and food combine.