“For me, it is important when I compose songs, not first and foremost to make music, but above all to give expression to the poet’s...

“For me, it is important when I compose songs, not first and foremost to make music, but above all to give expression to the poet’s innermost intentions. To let the poem reveal itself and to intensify it, that was my task. If this task is tackled, then the music is also successful. Not otherwise, no matter how celestially beautiful it may be.” At the time Edvard Grieg wrote these words in a letter to his biographer Henry Finck in 1903, he was at the height of his success and enjoyed the reputation as the greatest living composer in his native country of Norway. His popularity remains undiminished. Lyric soprano Siri Karoline Thornhill studied in her hometown of Stavanger, Norway and did her masters degree at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. She gathered further important impulses in master-classes with Anna Reynolds and Elly Ameling, and has worked with well-known conductors such as Ivan Fischer, Ton Kooopman, Daniel Reuss, and more. Her extensive discography includes recordings of Bach cantatas with La Petite Bande and Sigiswald Kuijken as well as all solo cantatas for soprano with Kolner Kammerorchester and Helmut Muller-Bruhl.