Susanna Karolina Wallumrød is a Norwegian singer, musician, composer, and three-time winner of the Spellemannprisen, her home country’s equivalent of the Grammy Awards. Susanna’s recording career now stretches back for almost two decades, during which time she has created some incredibly bold and innovative music as Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, Susanna Wallumrød, the Brotherhood of Our Lady, and in her present incarnation as Susanna. She has also collaborated with artists as diverse as the experimental musician Jenny Hval, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the baroque harpist, Giovanna Pessi, and the Norwegian jazz pianist Tord Gustavsen.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet, translator, literary and art critic, and a man who is viewed as being one of the most influential writers of the modernist era. No less an authority on the subject than the highly distinguished American-English poet and 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature T.S. Eliot described Baudelaire as “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language”.
And here the twain shall meet, on a tour of Norway, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, and Sweden entitled Susanna: Baudelaire & Piano where the Norwegian artist, accompanied by her fellow countrywoman and virtuoso cassette tape recordist and sound mixer, Stina Stjern will perform a selection of adaptations of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry – most specifically The Flowers of Evil, published in 1857 and most recently translated into English by Anthony Mortimer – set to music.
The source material for this tour comes from Susanna’s 2020 album Baudelaire & Piano and its follow-up two years later, Elevation, again inspired by the French poet though this time incorporating tape loops, spoken word, as well as song. And it is against a gentle backdrop of taped recitations in French and Stina Stjern’s textured reveille of birdsong that Susanna first goes to ‘The Dancing Snake’, the opening track on Baudelaire & Piano. The combination of her voice and the concert grand piano are nothing less than extraordinary as she extends effortlessly into her upper register, as Susanna brings an even great magic and mystery to the symbolism of Baudelaire’s words.
As Stina Stjern creates a minor electrical storm during ‘The Ghost’, Susanna gently sways on her piano stool, adding to the atmosphere and drama of the song. On ‘Burial’, Susanna’s voice emerges from its funereal gloom to remind me of a young Joni Mitchell. It is therefore little wonder to know that Susanna’s will next be joining a tribute project to the great Canadian musician as it tours Norway in April.
Susanna’s whistling highlights the desolation that lies at the heart of ‘Longing for Nothingness’ and when she sings, she again captures the sensuality, beauty, decadence, despair, and dream-like qualities that are all inherent in many of the contradictions of Baudelaire’s genius. She concludes this exceptional concert with two songs from Elevation, the desirous delights of ‘Destruction’ and, finally, the album’s simply gorgeous title track.
A word of mention too for The Arthur Sykes Rymer Auditorium, one of three large performance spaces on the University of York campus. The clarity and purity of the sound that was reproduced here for this concert was as good as anything I have experienced in a live music setting.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos from Susanna: Baudelaire & Piano in York are HERE
