Bjornstad / Henryson - Night Song

Tracklisting:

1. Night Song (Evening Version)
2. Visitor
3. Fall
4. Edge
5. Reticence
6. Schubert Said
7. Adoro
8. Share
9. Melting Ice
10. Serene
11. The Other
12. Own
13. Sheen
14. Chain
15. Tar
16. Night Song (Morning Version)

Night Song is an album of intimate duos for piano and cello, featuring original compositions by Norwegian Ketil Bjørnstad (with the melodies of Franz Schubert as an inspirational source) and by Swede Svante Henryson.

Ketil Bjørnstad’s ability to write warm and inviting music for piano and cello was confirmed by the The River (1996) and Epigraphs (1998), his duets with David Darling, which count amongst the popular works in his discography. Now the Norwegian pianist encounters a cellist of quite different temperament, “the perfect chamber musician” in Ketil’s estimate: Svante Henryson, who also contributes four compositions to the album.

This charming duo project is conceived by Bjørnstad as a “musical dialogue with Franz Schubert and a tribute to him.” Since schooldays, Ketil has been “obsessed with Schubert’s linear melodic and harmonic patterns”: some of these are rechanneled in this suite.

Currently one of the most talked-about figures in the European arts, Ketil Bjørnstad is going from strength to strength on two fronts. Each of his ECM recordings has received a chorus of praise from the critics. The recent Remembrance, released 2010, was described by the Daily Express as “exquisite, intriguing and, in its quiet way, life-affirming”. As a novelist Bjørnstad is also highly regarded. His book “To Music” is nominated for The Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize 2010. In France it won the “Prix des Lecteurs” prize and in Germany it shot into the best-seller lists.

Svante Henryson, also an artistic polymath, has a following in his own right, acquired in the course of an idiosyncratic career that has variously found him playing double-bass with the Oslo Philharmonic, bass guitar with Yngwie Malmsteen’s hard rock band, and cello with Jon Balke’s Magnetic North Orchestra. He has appeared on recordings of Stevie Wonder, Ryan Adams and Elvis Costello amongst others, and is also recognised as a composer of  contemporary classical music.