A trip back in time in 2023 Tall Ships Race host town Fredrikstad, Norway, and a surreal experience on a visit to nearby Momentum arts festival
- A piano recital aboard the world’s largest electric ferry served as a prelude to the previous staging of a biennial arts festival near Oslo that is back in 2023
- We paired our visit with a journey to nearby Fredrikstad, northern Europe’s best preserved fortress town and one of five hosts of the 2023 Tall Ships Race
Looking back from this side of the Covid-19 pandemic, my visit to Norway for the opening of the 11th Momentum arts festival was a surreal experience.
It was August 2021, and many borders around the world were still closed; flights within Europe could be taken only with a vaccine passport.
Norway was one of the few countries to have ditched its mask mandate and very few people on the streets still wore one. To arrive and be suddenly surrounded by maskless people was discombobulating.
The strangeness was only heightened by the first act of the festival, which took place on the 4.20pm ferry from the small town of Moss to the equally small town of Horten, across the Oslofjord.
On the upper rear deck of the 140-metre-long Bastø Electric, the world’s largest all-electric-powered ferry, octogenarian avant-garde pianist Charlemagne Palestine played an instrument valued at €200,000 (US$215,000) that had been winched aboard especially for the occasion.