Establishing a new music festival in Trøndelag
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Anders Krøger2 min read|12. August 2025
Music lovers in Stjørdal have good times ahead after the sisters Anna and Maria Sonstad announced that they are starting a new festival in the area. Kammermusikk på Hell takes place 16-18 January 2026.
-In recent years we have played annual private house concerts, where the audience has primarily been friends of our grandmother and grandfather. Many of the listeners experience live classical music only at these house concerts, and that has made us want to contribute to a broader classical offering in the region, says artistic director Anna Sonstad in an interview with LiveKlassisk.
A festival in the periphery
More and more festivals are being established outside the big cities, which is a good measure for decentralising classical music and for reaching new groups of listeners. The Sonstad sisters have laid out a strategy for inviting these into the concert hall.
-Among other things, we are working to make the concerts as accessible as possible, both in terms of physical accessibility and lowering the threshold for those who perhaps feel that a classical music concert is a somewhat unfamiliar and intimidating arena to venture into. With us, everyone is welcome!
The opening concert takes place in Vektersalen at Kimen on 16 January. After this the festival can boast a series of concerts spread across various venues in the Stjørdal area. The sisters also promise that a website with an overview of everything being arranged will appear shortly.
Classical heavyweights on the programme
The festival will consist of three main concerts, centred around the themes of Dante Alighieri's poem "The Divine Comedy"; "Purgatory", "Inferno" and "Paradise". The organisers can tempt with chamber music written by composers such as Franz Schubert, Sofia Gubaidulina and Johannes Brahms.
In addition, the audience can take on the role of curators themselves at the festival's planned request concert.
There is, in other words, plenty to look forward to for the roughly 25,000 people registered with a residential address in Stjørdal. Should you be living in other parts of the country, however, it is worth noting that the concerts are held within walking distance of Værnes Airport.