Ketil Bjørnstad

Vinding's Music is a double album conceived as a literary soundtrack. Its release by Ketil Bjørnstad, pianist and novelist, coincided with his 60th birthday. It also marked the Norwegian one-volume edition of his trilogy about a young piano student, Aksel Vinding: To Music, The River and The Lady in the Valley. The first disc has Bjørnstad improvising alone at the piano on themes tied to his protagonist. The second is a concert of the classical pieces that run through the novels.

For decades Bjørnstad kept writing and music apart. The Vinding books changed that, and he describes letting music into his fiction as "surprisingly liberating, almost like a confession". He drew on his own years as a piano student in Oslo in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The solo disc was recorded in December 2009 at Pettersens Kolonial Lydstudio in Hønefoss, on a C. Bechstein grand. The concert disc was taped in March 2009 at the NRK Store Studio in Oslo with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Christian Eggen, produced by Geoff Miles. The pianists are Gunilla Süssmann and Jie Zhang. The set was made with Bjørnstad's publishers Aschehoug and Suhrkamp.

The nine improvisations take their titles from the trilogy and range from the eleven minutes of So Far, So Hidden to the three of Evening Voices. Some came straight from the moment, others grew from themes found during a studio session of nearly an hour. The Stones, the River has the hymn-like calm his listeners know, and New Morning closes the disc on a brighter note. On the second disc Eggen plays the Adagio of Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 488. Süssmann plays Debussy's Clair de lune, the Adagio sostenuto of Rachmaninov's Second Concerto and the last movement of Beethoven's Sonata op. 109. Zhang plays Chopin's First Ballade and the Adagio assai of Ravel's G major Concerto, and Barber's Adagio for Strings ends the programme.

Writing on ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo placed the set beside Bjørnstad's earlier ECM work, from the two Sea albums onwards, and heard it as the diary of a soul. In the Thüringer Allgemeine, Ulrich Steinmetzger called him a piano whisperer who does without fortissimo, and the album "a recording that delights the ears and takes stock of his piano career".

This is the double CD on ECM Records, ECM 2170/71, first released in April 2012, with liner notes by Bjørnstad.