Chamber music has always been part of my activities as a musician, since the age of 16, when I started studying at the Bergen Conservatory of Music in Norway. The first year in my studies I was put together with a viola player and a mezzo soprano, to get chamber music experience. It was a new and exciting world for me to work so closely in detail with one other person, to investigate a score together. I think I spent almost as much time that first year with Brahms viola sonatas and Schubert's Arpeggione, Schumann's Frauenliebe und leben and Mussorgsky's Kinderstube, as I would do with my solo Chopin Etudes, Beethoven sonatas, Prokofiev and Liszt concertos. Since then, I have been hooked on chamber music. And I agree with my co-artistic director at the Risør Chamber Music Festival, Lars Anders Tomter, when he says: "Isn’t chamber music just the most normal form of music making? Two, three, four people coming together, to play the music that they love, much like a rock-band rehearsing in the garage?" That’s how chamber music should be seen, and it used to be much like that a hundred years ago when people played instruments at home, rather than putting on a CD or a DVD like today. In our days chamber music is often seen as a kind of niche, the very fine of the finest music, elitist...

Places which have proved to have the contrary effect to elitist clubs, are summer chamber music festivals. When I was twenty, and participated at the first Risør chamber music festival, my life changed. And it would be even more changed two years later, when I was asked to lead the festival artistically, together with Lars Anders Tomter, something we have been doing right up until now. But that first year, I distinctly remember when it all happened for me. I was sitting listening to a concert in the magical baroque wooden church in Risør. Lars Anders was playing Hindemith's Trauermusik with our chamber orchestra, then as this sombre dark world faded out, mezzo-soprano Randi Stene began singing from the organ gallery, with the comforting caressing phrases of Duruflé’s Pie Jesu (from the Requiem). I had tears in my eyes, and it would only be the first of many times in Risør. In that church I have had stronger musical experiences than anywhere else during the years, and chamber music became essential to my life.

How fortunate I have been in Risør, to have the opportunity to meet, listen to and for the first time play together with artists such as Ian Bostridge, the Artemis and Belcea Quartets, Gidon Kremer, Clemens Hagen, Martin Fröst, Sabine Meyer, Francois Leleux , Håkan Hardenberger, Christianne Stotijn, Barbara Hendricks, Marc André Hamelin, Emmanuel Ax and many others. In addition, old friends such as Christian Tetzlaff, Heinrich Schiff and Matthias Goerne have come regularly and made me feel like this is the ultimate meeting place for musicians and for music-making.

What often strikes me in Risør, is how the quality of the music-making during the festival week gets better and better. Quite a few artists play better on the last day than the first. It always helps to get used to an acoustic, and the acoustic in the church in Risør is wonderful but challenging. It has quality, but it is rather dry and direct, and some audience-members might just sit a foot or two away. (We say in Risør that you don’t only see and hear the musicians there, but you might smell them too!) Such is the intimacy of the space that there is nothing to hide behind, no distance, no glossy resonant sounds. I always feel that when I am playing there, this is the most honest experience I am encountering. I want to give of myself on that stage, where everything is being heard, every whisper, every sigh, every cry. Hearing a string quartet in such a room can be such an overwhealming , a life-changing experience, like I experienced quite a few years ago, hearing the Artemis performing Schubert's miraculous G major quartet late at night. I think this environment gets very close to the rooms for which much of this music was composed, and that it therefore feels so right. It has the beauty of an aristocratic salon, and the intimacy of a large living-room. Great music has a tendency to work well in many settings, but ultimately Mozart's sonatas for violin and piano are not composed to be played in the Royal Festival Hall, but rather in an intimate setting with just a few friends seated around the musicians.

Everything in life has an end, and after so many wonderful years in Risør, I decided that this year would be my last as artistic director. The festival is lucky to have the wonderful violinist Henning Kraggerud to follow me as artistic director from next year. I will be very happy to go there to play around midsummer, but without the added pressure of putting together a new programme every year. The last programme Lars Anders and I are responsible for putting together is in fact this autumn’s foreign tour, which takes us on mini residencies to the Palais des Beaux Brussels, the Wigmore hall in London and the Carnegie Hall, New York. A handful of wonderful soloists plus our dear chamber orchestra - the Risør Festival Strings - will be touring together for over two weeks. I am so much looking forward to it! We can’t bring the magical midsummer light from Norway, nor the baroque church or that unique intimacy to the bigger cities. But what we can bring is the joy of music making, which I find again and again so special in Risør, to some of the best and most famous chamber music halls of the world.

For a list of all the concerts visit Leif Ove's website