The concert is one of several events planned this year, and people cued up outside the concert hall hours before the show started. In the audience was director Stein Olav Henrichsen of The Munch Museum in Oslo and Norway’s ambassador to The United States, Wegger Chr. Strømmen. The two emphasized how important Munch’s art is for Norwegian cultural life.
“The Scream was painted in 1895. More than 100 years later, it is still a huge draw. But Munch was much more than just The Scream. Tonight we will see several other works by Munch that are equally notable. This is the world premiere of The Munch Suite, which brings together noted musicians from Norway and the gallery’s very talented orchestra. A truly international collaboration,”ambassador Strømmen told the 500 strong audience.
Read The Washington Post's review of the concert here.
Commissioned by flutist and music professor Andreas Sønning, and created collaboratively by Sønning and composer Kjell Habbestad, The Munch Suite consists of seven musical movements, each of which is a musical interpretation of a corresponding painting from Munch’s Frieze of Life series. While the orchestra played, projections of the painting and texts by Munch were displayed, the music interpreting the painting, the camera panning around the painting to highlight different parts. At the same time, Sønning’s flute solo echoed the part of the painting being shown.
“The orchestra is in a way depicting the paintings themselves, while the flute soloist is the spectator or narrator representing Munch’s words and commenting on what he sees,” Habbestad said.
To develop the suite, the two men studied the paintings together, thinking about what the paintings meant and what emotions they evoked. The collaborators also read Munch’s poetry for inspiration. “I had to go into the interpretation of every movement, studying each painting and each text,” Sønning says. “You can read a story in the paintings, and through the text.” Sønning and Habbestad try to tell that story through music.
“We take the feelings that captured us [as we looked at Munch’s paintings] and then we have made music from our imagination of it. We have to make the music, and Munch has made the inspiration,” says Sønning.
The idea for the combination came to Sønning in Tokyo, in 1993. He had been invited to play at a Munch exhibition with the New Japan Philharmonic. As he played beautiful, romantic music on his flute, Munch’s disturbing masterpiece, The Scream, was shown in the background.
“That was, as you can understand, not quite conceptually correct,” he jokes. But the cognitive dissonance, the unusual juxtaposition of Munch’s tortured visuals with sonorous, hopeful music, inspired him.
“I’ve been inspired now for nearly 20 years by Munch,” he says, looking back on that day.
Habbestad explains what The Frieze of Life — and, by extension, The Munch Suite — is about: “This work reveals Munch’s preoccupation with the ‘fall of man’ myth and his pessimistic philosophy of love. The major motifs are the stages of life, the femme fatale, the hopelessness of love, anxiety, infidelity, jealousy, sexual humiliation, and separation in life and death.”
Sønning believes that the artist’s work is just as relevant today as it was when it was created.
“One hundred fifty years after his birth, Munch is still very relevant, because his work is about human beings. He is expressing feelings and issues that are not outdated. His work is about love, harmonious relationships between men and women — something he wasn’t good at, but which he sought — and between all people,” says Sønning. “I think it’s timeless, his way of expressing it.”