Your music has been described as accessible and entertaining as well as being rigorously constructed intellectually. Do you see your music this way, and is it important to you for your music to be accessible and/or entertaining?
It is an interesting observation. I’m not sure about the “rigorously constructed” part. I don’t like to construct music. My ideas and my structures have to come naturally, spontaneously. I always follow my musical instincts when I work. But of course you have to structure your ideas, and it is also important to analyse your ideas so that the composition has substance and a clear focus. I’m happy that people experience my music as accessible and entertaining. I like entertaining music. Though I find it important to communicate that “entertaining” is not the opposite to “serious”.
In ‘Three Pictures’ the music describes three paintings: ‘Rue Lafayette’, ‘Night in St Cloud’ and ‘At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo’ by Edvard Munch. How do you draw inspiration from the works of Munch and have you also been inspired/influenced by other visual artists?
Visual art and music have so much in common. In fact, there are many composers that are also very talented visual artists. Think about Schönberg and Gershwin, to name a couple. I come from a family with lots of talent in that art form. My father was an architect and also a wonderful painter. So I grew up drawing and painting all the time, and I have always thought very visually when I compose. I’m constantly inspired by visual art, and I love to go to art exhibitions. Especially retrospective exhibitions of a particular artist. Then you see how an artist develops his or her ideas through the years. And sometimes you see how the same idea is evident through their whole life span. One retrospective exhibition that will stay with me forever was with the German artist Gerhardt Richter at the Centre de Pompidou. What an artist!
In ‘Three Pictures’ I have tried to recreate the composition of the painting. The colors, the light, the contrasts, and the drama that I found in them. I created my own stories when I interpreted the pictures. All of that provided me with lots of musical ideas.
I have a couple of other works inspired by visual artists. I was commissioned to write a work for the 100th anniversary for the Munch paintings at the Oslo University Hall (University Aula), a beautiful concert hall in Oslo centre where Munch decorated the hall with fantastic paintings in 1916. I wrote a work for baritone and piano, inspired by his painting ‘Chemistry’. There I also used some of his own texts about that picture. My string quartet ‘La Nouvelle Athènes’ is inspired by the area in Paris where all the artists lived at the end of the 19th century. The streets there commemorate the famous painters, so the three movements are dedicated to Van Gogh, Gauguin and Moreau. Here I also created my own drama. There are so many stories related to these artists and the streets where they lived.
As a Norwegian composer is it important for you to engage with the works of your fellow Norwegians such as Munch?
Well, I haven’t thought so much about that. But the work ‘Three Pictures’ was a commission for a chamber music festival at the Munch Museum in Oslo. The fabulous trumpet player Tine Thing Helseth was the artistic director, and she wanted me to compose a work inspired by Munch. So I chose those pictures, created in France. I have spent a lot of time in Paris, so I felt a strong connection to those paintings. I am a frequent visitor at the National Museum here in Oslo. I love to walk around and get inspired by the art there. Some of the iconic pictures from the golden age of the Norwegian national romantic era are truly inspiring. I am very much connected to the Norwegian tradition in all the arts. But I also think it is important to look up and take in other influences, other cultures. We live in a multi cultural society, and I have reflected on that in some of my other compositions.
It can be very restrictive to always try to be a part of the Norwegian tradition. As a composer, if you for instance incorporate Norwegian folk music, before you know it, you sound like Grieg. So we have to look for new ways. Several contemporary composers have made great contributions in how to use the Norwegian folk tradition as an organic part of their music, in a new and original way.
‘A Desperate Light’ was influenced by Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Age of Anxiety’ as well as other works from the great composer. How do you approach engaging with your illustrious predecessors?
This work was actually written for a competition in Vienna, celebrating Bernstein. A good friend of mine, the conductor Caspar Richter who lived in Vienna (and sadly passed away 2 years ago), called me and urged me to write a piece for that competition. I am a huge fan of Bernstein and I have listened to his music all my life. This was during the pandemic in one of the worst lockdowns. I felt that I lived in an age of anxiety, so I wanted to write a piece that reflected that. In my ‘Bernstein-bubble’, the music that came out was absolutely “Bernsteinesque”. It might sound like American film music from the ’50s or ’60s. Alfred Newman and another Bernstein, Elmer Bernstein, come to mind. We are all standing on the shoulders of our predecessors so we should acknowledge that, and send some gratitude to them now and then! And I wish that my friend Caspar could have heard this piece.
You describe your composition ‘Symphonic Suite from Around the World in Eighty Days’ as “a concerto for orchestra”. How did you transform the music from your wildly successful work into a concerto for orchestra? Did you enjoy the process of revisiting this work and transforming it?
The opera consists of a lot of symphonic music, many orchestral interludes, and my idea in this opera was actually to make a symphonic form of the whole musical drama. I always think like that in my musical theatre works. So I thought that it would be good to create a symphonic work from all this material, since it is very hard to get a big opera like this produced again. I didn’t want this music to disappear in a drawer.
I wanted to make a work that showcased all the instruments in the orchestra. I want the musicians to feel that they all have an important part to play! In the sections where there were vocal solos I naturally gave them to different solo instruments. For instance, the coloratura aria for Violetta in Paris, was made into a short violin concerto. It was a challenge to fit everything together, so I composed transitions between all the sections to make everything organic. But it was a real joy to revisit this. I am planning to do similar suites from several of my other operas as well. When I have the time…