This special limited edition CD comes with a set of postcard reproductions of the 15 Munch paintings that the music is based on in a black box the size of which suggests it contains cigars. It seems a little bit more than is required.
I had been expecting music composed by Kraggerud because as well as being the violinist in the Tchaikovsky concerto at the Proms a few years ago, he encored there with a composition of his own. That, plus the Brodsky Quartet, in their Wheel of Fortune show, had a Kraggerud piece as one of the options when we in Portsmouth got the Golijov.
So it wasn't quite what I was anticipating. I must pay more attention. However, the music is exactly how I thought it would be. 15 composers were invited to contribute a piece based on a different painting from an exhibition of Munch. The solo violin music on CD in my house goes straight from Bach to Ysaye and then Bartok, Ligeti and Kurtag. With these more recent composers, the trend has finally moved back slightly towards harmonics while retaining much of the fractured structure of the modernist period. For me, on the fourth hearing, they could all be by the same composer. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's me, isn't it. I don't really see very far into the relationship between paint and sound. Of course, Munch's paintings are about trauma, anxiety and the sub-conscious but the paintings are varied in subject matter and the pieces could be exchanged around between them like horoscopes in cheap magazines for readers who are determined to see themselves in any vague prediction. Without concentrating on which picture it is one is listening to, the 15 items could merge into one long piece, which is again not the end of the world. The music does fit the paintings but perhaps no more so than lots of other music that wasn't written specifically for the purpose.
The one where I first made a connection of sorts was Moonlight over the Sea by Alissa Firsova but that is as much due to the note provided as any,
a distinctive glissando motif portays the moon's reflection at the centre of the painting...The theme is repeated pizzicato, as if mirrored in the water
So, okay, I can do it when I try but the music is engaging enough, the playing so sensitively delivered, that I'm enjoying it as much as I'm ever going to without going to those lengths.
The later pictures are the highlights. Two Women on the Shore are a golden haired girl in a white dress standing and looking out to see with a ghastly figure in dark clothes sitting at her side somehow attentive. Athanasia Tzanou's music provides a commentary but any of the other shimmering, desolate, spare compositions would have done it equally well.
Munch's figures are by turns grim, staring blankly, faceless or looking away from us. The music has passages of lyricism in places but none that last long enough to let us think we have ever escaped the insecurities and neuroses that lurk never far below the surface. We finish as serenely as can be allowed with Laurent Petitgirard's Trees on the Beach.
It lasts for an hour and it is an hour well spent but possibly not always for the reasons intended.