Sunrise is subtitled A cantata on texts by Edvard Munch, and was originally commissioned by the Nordstrand Musikkselskap Choir for their 70th anniversary in 2011. Munch, a darkly tragic artist known to the world for his four works called ‘The Scream’ completed between 1893 and 1910, is a figure who holds a special fascination for Bjørnstadt, who reconstructed his life in 1993 as a literary biography using Munch's own diaries and letters, the accounts of Munch's contemporaries and friends plus contemporaneous newspaper and journal accounts of the time in his critically acclaimed The Story of Edvard Munch (published in English translation in the UK in 2001). With Sunrise he translates his impressions of the emotional force, angst and the kind of redemption Munch discovered later in life into cantata form for female voice (Kari Bremmnes) and chorus (the Oslo Chamber Choir). The libretto comes from Munch himself, set to music by Bjørnstadt, who observes, “Munch always wrote something about his motifs before painting them. These were often short prose texts describing the subject matter he envisioned in the picture [and] can be compared to his paintings in their power and intensity.” Of course the texts are in Norwegian, but that hardly diminishes the emotional force of this music. Bjørnstadt succeeds in conveying Munch's dark, difficult genius and – as Bjørnstadt points out – the light (or enlightenment) that rescued him from his demons in 1909, as he began to emerge from the darkness of his torment into the sunrise. A remarkable album that numbers among Bjørnstadt's finest achievements.