It's frankly Scandinavian

COPENHAGEN — In his 1979 film, "Manhattan," Woody Allen, ever the sarcastic pessimist, wonders why life is worth living. He comes up with Brando, Sinatra, Groucho, the second movement of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony and Cezanne's pears among the few things that make it worthwhile. And "Swedish movies, naturally." Director Ingmar Bergman was the best-known Scandinavian artist, and Swedish cinema was a voyeuristic American's most likely contact with a supposedly sexually liberated Scandinavia.

Two years after his death at 89, Bergman still looms large over Scandinavian culture. Sex clearly hasn't gone away, either. But on a recent trip to Sweden, Norway and Denmark, I found that classical music now appears to be widely regarded as one of the certain things that makes life worth living in a land where pessimists, sarcastic and otherwise, are not hard to come by.

Bergman and, at least to some extent, sex play into this phenomenon. Every opera production I saw, for instance, was Bergmanesque, sexually graphic or both. The brilliant way Bergman used music to find unexpected levels of meaning in his films and opera productions seems to have seeped into a musical culture. But there is also a new generation afoot, applying these influences to its own ends.

All but one of the major orchestras in Scandinavia are directed by conductors between the ages of 28 and 45. (The exception is the 53-year-old Finn Jukka-Pekka Sarasate at the Oslo Philharmonic.) When a 27-year-old Danish director, Kasper Bech Holten, was appointed head of the Royal Danish Opera in 2000, he became the youngest person to head a European opera house.

In January, a 44-year-old Scottish director, Paul Curran, became head of the Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo, where the company has a year-old opera house that's become a tourist attraction. Copenhagen boasts a brand-new concert hall and a 3-year-old opera house on the harbor that has become one of the welcoming sites for cruise ships sailing into the city.

I began my trip late last month in Stockholm just as the Ingmar Bergman International Theatre Festival 2009 was beginning. On back-to-back nights I saw a crude, silly, sex-besotted staging of Verdi's "La Traviata" at the Royal Swedish Opera and a far crasser staging of Bergman's 1972 masterpiece, "Cries and Whispers."