PODIUM - Fartein Valen internasjonale musikkfest
11. - 20. june 2027
PODIUM – Fartein Valen internasjonale musikkfest is an annual music festival based in Haugesund and the surrounding region of western Norway. Founded in 2008 by Mathias Halvorsen and Guro Pettersen, PODIUM began as a small chamber-music festival built around a simple idea: to bring musicians together in an environment where ambitious programming, informality and a close relationship with the audience could exist side by side.
Since then, the festival has grown considerably. In 2024 PODIUM merged with the long-established Fartein Valen Festival, creating a larger regional festival with activities across Haugesund, Sveio and Karmøy, and with Norwegian composer Fartein Valen as one of its central historical and artistic reference points. Today the festival presents around 25 concerts during its main festival period, alongside an extensive programme for children and young people, school concerts, collaborations with local cultural institutions, amateur musicians and ensembles, and projects taking place throughout the year.
The artistic profile remains deliberately broad. Classical chamber music forms the backbone of the festival, but programmes regularly move between contemporary music, major works of the historical repertoire, new commissions, arrangements, experimental concert formats and projects that sit somewhere between concert, installation and performance. A six-hour Morton Feldman string quartet, Radiohead reimagined for chamber ensemble, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, intimate musician encounters, orchestral projects, gallery concerts and concerts conceived for young audiences can all belong within the same festival.
Rather than separating the familiar from the unfamiliar, the aim has been to create contexts in which they illuminate one another. Fartein Valen’s music is treated in much the same way: not as a historical obligation, but as music capable of entering into dialogue with repertoire and ideas from very different periods. The festival’s programming is driven by curiosity, contrast and the belief that adventurous artistic work does not require an exclusive atmosphere.
This relationship between ambition and accessibility has become central to PODIUM. Concerts are often presented at close range, with little of the ceremonial distance traditionally associated with classical music, and musicians frequently appear in several different constellations during the festival. Audiences meet the same performers repeatedly over a number of days, and the distinction between artist, festival and local community becomes unusually porous. The result is a festival that can accommodate large-scale artistic projects while retaining much of the intimacy and personal character of its beginnings.
The scale of the festival’s public work has expanded particularly strongly in recent years. Following the 2024 merger, annual attendance rose from a few hundred visitors to well over two thousand, while projects for children and young people have become one of its largest areas of activity. In 2026 the festival presented 64 events and performances including its school programme, reaching almost 2,900 audience members; the touring project Transfigurator 3000 alone was performed 37 times for 971 schoolchildren in four municipalities.
For me, PODIUM has always been as much an ongoing artistic experiment as a festival: a place to test programmes, formats and collaborations that would be difficult to realise elsewhere, and to build long-term relationships with musicians whose work I admire. What began in 2008 as a small independent project has gradually become one of the principal meeting places for chamber music between Stavanger and Bergen, while retaining the freedom to be playful, peculiar and occasionally unreasonable.
I share the artistic direction of the festival with double bassist Nikolai Matthews.
