Ketil Bjørnstad

Sunrise (Soloppgang) is a cantata by the Norwegian pianist, composer and writer Ketil Bjørnstad on prose by Edvard Munch. Munch often wrote short texts about a subject before he painted it, and his writings are still far less known than his pictures. Bjørnstad sets them in nineteen sections for solo voice, chamber choir and a small band, moving between song, choral writing, instrumental interludes and free improvisation.

Bjørnstad had approached the painter before, in his 1993 novel Historien om Edvard Munch and on Løsrivelse, an album of Munch texts made with the singer Kari Bremnes. When he was invited to write for choir in 2011, he went back to those writings. Bremnes sings the solo pieces, and the Oslo Chamber Choir appears in eight sections under Egil Fossum, who also arranged the choral parts. Bjørnstad plays piano, with Aage Kvalbein on cello and a group of alto saxophone, double bass and percussion. The recording was made at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in April 2012, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer.

The texts are sung in Norwegian, and the booklet prints them in English translation. In his liner notes Bjørnstad writes that they "all portray existentialist dilemmas: surviving or being destroyed, believing or observing", and their changing moods lead to very different settings. Stupet (The Cliff) turns Munch's image of a narrow path above an unfathomable sea into a quiet ballad. The three short recitatives break into free improvisation, the most unbound playing on the record, while the three intermezzos are instrumental. The cycle closes with Soloppgang, the sunrise of the title.

In Norway, where the album appeared first, the magazine Audophile called Bremnes "a formidable Munch interpreter" and the record a wonderful production. Not every critic was won over. Writing for MusicWeb International in 2014, Dominy Clements found the settings too uniform for the force of Munch's imagery. He still praised the musicianship and wrote that "the low-key singing of Kari Bremnes is perfect for the solo songs".

This is the CD edition, ECM 2336, in a jewel case with a 28-page booklet inside a cardboard O-card, and the cover reproduces Munch's woodcut Towards the Forest I. It was first released in Norway in 2013 for the 150th anniversary of Munch's birth, and internationally in April 2014.