Brilliant Suns

Susanna Wallumrød sings Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra in music that glows and decays.

The Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno thought of shadow not as darkness, but as the zone where direct light becomes bearable, and where what has struck us can begin to be held and remembered. Lene Grenager's Traces of Light, for orchestra, works in that half-lit space.

Then Susanna's songs hits you. We move away from that afterlight of memory and into Baudelaire's erosions, "deep as tombs." She sets eight poems from The Flowers of Evil for voice and orchestra, some about light and ether, others descending into fatigue, corruption and the wish to disappear. Between purification and ideal, something darker presses through: flesh, the subterranean, worms. 

Baudelaire & Orchestra is the nervous system at the moment of impact. Traces of Light is what remains after the strike: residue, the memory of light held in thought. Ellen Reid’s Petrichor has the orchestra surround you, creating music out of the smell of soil after storm.

Bright flowers, with smells that linger.

Programme

Ellen Reid Petrichor (2018) 

Lene Grenager Traces of Light (2019) 

Susanna Wallumrød Baudelaire & Orchestra (2020/2023) 

Want to know more?

• Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a French poet whose collection Les Fleurs du Mal was prosecuted for obscenity on publication in 1857. Today it is considered a masterwork and is part of the standard curriculum in French schools.
• Susanna Wallumrød's Baudelaire & Orchestra began as a song cycle for voice and piano, later combined with music for cassette players made and performed by Stina Stjern, who also performs here.
• Traces of Light was written for and premiered by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK) in 2019. Tonight the orchestra performs it again in their home base, Store Studio.
• Do you remember last year's Petrichor by Kristine Tjøgersen? The smell seems to keep returning to Ultima, in the September rain.