Lars Petter Hagen Named Managing Director of Norwegian National Opera & Ballet

Lars Petter Hagen will become Managing Director of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, the company has announced. He succeeds Geir Bergkastet, who steps down next year.

Hagen arrives from the Bergen Festival, where he serves as Artistic Director and Chief Executive. He has held leadership positions in Norwegian arts institutions since 2003 while maintaining an international career as a composer.

His international breakthrough came in 2005 at the Donaueschinger Tage für Neue Musik, where his commissioned work Norske arkiver received its world premiere from the Hilversum Radio Chamber Orchestra under Peter Eötvös. The premiere placed Hagen, then in his mid-twenties, among the most closely watched young composers in European new music.

The commission list that followed maps the continent's leading contemporary institutions: Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, the Darmstadt Summer Course, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Collegium Novum Zürich, Radio France, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Cikada and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.

Hagen's compositional work has earned Norway's principal awards. He received the Arne Nordheim Composer's Prize in 2003 and the Edvard prize in 2004 for Passage – Silence and Light Triptych.

The appointment pairs an administrator with two decades of festival and institutional experience in Norway with a composer's standing on the international new-music scene. Hagen will take up the Oslo post as the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet continues to operate from the Oslo Opera House, its waterfront home since 2008.