The artist and composer/songwriter Susanna Wallumrød has set music to poetry by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), from his once forbidden “Les Fleurs du Mal”. Highly acclaimed and award winning; Susanna has previously made success with interpretations of other people’s songs in additton to her own originals. This time around it is French modernist Baudelaire who has caught her attention, and led to a symbiosis of Susanna music together with his 19th century poetry in an English translation. The song cycle Baudelaire & Piano is performed stripped down with piano and vocals, and for her London show Susanna is bringing elements from the concert-performance Baudelaire & Piano, which premiered at Henie Onstad Arts Center in 2020. Music for tapes and tape-recorders is composed and played by Stina Stjern.

Here you’ll find a creepy cast of witches, pagans, wolves, perverts, thugs, ghosts, vampires and demons. The songs struggle with lust and saintliness, angels and demons, tenderness and sadism, and the relentless march of Pme, the destroyer. Beauty with an edge of strangeness. Sin as a swallowing abyss. In Susanna’s haunting settings and performance, the poetry of Baudelaire has found its ideal transmitter.

Based in Oslo, the singer/songwriter and artist Susanna formed her Susanna and the Magical Orchestra duo in 2000 for exquisite, minimalistic interpretations of pop songs, both mainstream and leftfield. Since 2007 her songwriting has travelled in multiple directions, from her Meshes of Voice project with transgressive singer Jenny Hval, to settings of Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo, and the collaboration with new music group Ensemble neoN on The Forester (2013). Go Dig My Grave (2018) was called ‘a wondrous, haunting bunch of covers’ (Uncut). 2019’s Garden of Earthly Delights was praised as ‘brilliant and compelling’ in the international press. 2020’s Baudelaire & Piano received 4/5 stars in The Guardian, Irish Times in addition to being Critic’s Choice in The Financial Times.