Not so much a scream as an existential cry from the heart this cantata is derived from texts of Edvard Munch composed by the Norwegian pianist Ketil Bjørnstad joined here by his sextet and the Oslo chamber choir conducted by Egil Fossum. In the 1990s Bjørnstad wrote a novel about Munch returning to the subject with music in mind this time three years ago concentrating on Munch’s writings and releasing this album last year firstly in Norway to mark the 150th anniversary of Munch’s birth.
Sunrise was recorded in 2012 at the Rainbow studio in Oslo, and the cover you see above shows a woodcut of Munch’s from 1897 while his texts are reproduced in the CD booklet in Norwegian and English. Bjørnstad in the liner notes says Munch’s prose style was influenced by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg and the anarchist Hans Jæger and compares Munch’s texts to his better known paintings in terms of their “power and intensity.”
The texts deal with weighty subjects including Munch’s trauma as a child when his mother died. Aage Kvalbein’s brooding cello makes its personality felt early on, the gloriously dark sonorities in the solo pouring out in the first piece, one of the most memorable of the whole album, a piece that dwells on inner torment, a metaphorical bird of prey trapped inside the speaker’s very being, Bjørnstad’s accompaniment lapping in and out of the interweaving vocal part.
It’s the alto saxophone of Matias Bjørnstad that acts as companion to Kari Bremnes’ vocal solo on ‘Moren’ (‘Mother’) Munch’s poetic recollection of his mother’s death. Moving, it’s not at all mawkish and there’s little sentimentality in Munch’s very modern elemental writing.
Nineteen mostly short pieces in all here, some very brief indeed with a few coming in at under a minute although there is plenty of substance throughout. A serene chamber piece that exists beyond genre (with little jazz incidentally), there’s a hymn-like side to parts of it, for instance on the third piece ‘Nothing is Small’, but there are some rhythmic elements too for instance in ‘The Earth Loved the Air’ section while the first recitative is experimental with a free-jazz opening, otherwise ‘The Cliff’ has a latinate touch and a lightness that belies this meditation on suicide. But despite the overwhelming atmosphere of parts of the album there is also a lot of joy, ‘The Dance of Life’ most obviously harnessing the energy of the choir. Yet ‘Open Window’ has that heartbreaking cello again.
You come away from the album with an overriding glimpse of the vividness and extremities of Munch’s sheer passion and even terror in his texts. It’s Bjørnstad’s keenness in observing these and channelling them through voices and his small group that is so remarkable.
An album that balances huge tensions (‘Recitative II’), natural forces, the sound of the wind even evoked you’d swear, and somehow a coming to terms with it all on a piece such as the enchanting second ‘Intermezzo’. You might think of Munch in a very different way after listening to Sunrise, the sheer elementalism of the words and honesty of the performance striking and immediate.
