Ketil Bjørnstad, Anneli Drecker

A Suite of Poems is a song cycle for voice and piano by the Norwegian pianist and composer Ketil Bjørnstad, sung by Anneli Drecker. Its thirteen songs set English poems by the Norwegian-Danish writer Lars Saabye Christensen, who over many years sent his friend short "hotel poems" from his travels. Each song bears the name of a hotel and a city, from New York and Melbourne to Krakow, Venice and Hong Kong. The subject is the solitude of the traveller, written down in rooms far from home.

Bjørnstad and Christensen have known each other since their teenage years. Settings of literary texts form a line of their own in the pianist's catalogue, next to A Passion for John Donne, Sunrise and The Light. Drecker, born in Tromsø, first became known in the 1980s as the singer of the Norwegian group Bel Canto and has also worked as an actress. She had already sung on Bjørnstad's Grace in 2000. The album was recorded in June 2016 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer, and Bjørnstad produced it himself.

The settings are spare, mostly slow, and they follow the words rather than forcing them into a set form. On the opener, Mayflower, New York, Drecker sings softly, with a light vibrato. Palace, Copenhagen goes back to Christensen's first night in a hotel, as a boy in 1963, and the piano turns from minor to major. Astor Crowne, New Orleans is the exception, a slow bluesy shuffle with a touch of humour. The cycle ends with Schloss Elmau, a piece for piano alone.

In PopMatters in 2018, John Garratt heard Bjørnstad "writing in service to the poetry". He found the vocal passages "delicate, memorable, just about perfect in their range and fluidity". Robert Shore of Jazzwise called the album "intimate and unostentatious in delivery". In the liner notes Bjørnstad says that hotel rooms taught him how to be alone, and that he feels close to the lonely, existential outlook of these poems.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2440, first released on 18 May 2018, with the poems printed in the booklet.