Opera Café – Operetta Festival Vol. 2

Two Trønders and one Hedmark native return to Sandnes to sing with a full opera choir!

The trio presents beautiful, humorous and grand highlights from the opera and operetta repertoire, featuring excerpts from The Merry Widow, Turandot and The Gypsy Princess.

Welcome to an opera café filled with laughter, lavish emotions and plenty of champagne sparkle!

BIO

Soprano Ingeborg Haugvik Francke was born and raised in Hamar. She trained at the NTNU Department of Music in Trondheim, where she is now based. Her work spans opera roles, musical theatre, ensemble singing and church music. Ingeborg has been engaged with organisations such as Opera Trøndelag, Operaen in Kristiansund, Sandnes Opera and Operetta Company, and the Kirsten Flagstad Festival. In 2018, 2019 and 2020 she received the SpareBank 1 Østlandet Cultural Talent Award.

Sivert Almås Jullumstrø is a freelance singer from Trondheim. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in classical singing at NTNU in 2019. Sivert has taken part in several productions for Opera Trøndelag, Opera Østfold, Operaen in Kristiansund and Opera di Setra. He made his debut in 2019 as Vicomte Cascada in Opera di Setra’s award-winning production of The Merry Widow. Since then, he has appeared as Monostatos in The Magic Flute, Rolf in The Sound of Music, Simon Snusen in Flåklypa – Tidens Opera, and Ole Finberg in Fjeldeventyret. Sivert received the Opera Trøndelag Friends’ Talent Award in 2020.

Knut Erik Jensen is a pianist and university lecturer at NTNU, Department of Music, and head of the piano class at the Saturday School of Trondheim Cultural School. He has an extensive freelance career and holds a master’s degree in piano performance from NTNU, where he performed Scriabin’s Piano Concerto with the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra for his final exam. He has long been a sought-after musician in Norway, especially in opera and vocal music as an accompanist and repetiteur, as well as a chamber musician and soloist. Since 2007, he has performed around 200 concerts in the USA, both as a soloist and with singers and instrumentalists. Recent highlights include performing all of Grieg’s songs in Seattle and Portland across seven concerts, and appearing as soloist in piano concertos by Grieg and Klaus Egge. He is also active in commissioning and promoting Norwegian piano music. In 2013 he premiered Ståle Kleiberg’s piano sonata Ruf und Nachklang, and in 2025 he will premiere and record a piano suite by Marcus Paus, which he commissioned himself. He has recorded works by Marcus Paus, including Requiem, Læreren som ikke ble and Trisyn (2022), and in 2024 he was pianist on Tone Kummervold’s critically acclaimed album Unravel Tradition. He has also released two solo albums of Norwegian piano music.