Susanna and Juhani Silvola premiere a live video of Love Will Tear Us Apart, the Joy Division song Susanna first recorded for Rune Grammofon in 2006. She sings it now stripped back, her voice against Silvola’s guitar; the two have played as a duo since 2020.
“Love Will Tear Us Apart is one of the most heartbreaking songs I know, and it has been an absolute pleasure to sing it over the years,” Susanna says. “It is 20 years since we released this cover with Susanna and the Magical Orchestra on the album ‘Melody Mountain’. People are still asking for it at concerts but I haven’t always had it in my set. It’s a true pleasure to get to play it with Juhani Silvola on guitar these days.”
Regular readers will know Silvola well, usually in different company. With Scottish fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers he makes up a Scottish-Finnish duo whose chamber-folk albums we’ve followed closely — The Smoky Smirr o Rain (2021), Sølvstrøk (2023) and last year’s How to Raise the Wind. The same partnership widened into the Siskin Quartet with Anglo-Swedish duo Bridget Marsden and Leif Ottosson for 2022’s Flight Paths, another we singled out. A guitarist and producer who has moved through Norwegian traditional and indie circles, Silvola usually works as the grounding presence, laying rhythm and texture beneath a fiddle — a restraint that also sits well behind a voice as central as Susanna’s.
Susanna Wallumrød, for her part, has built one of the more singular catalogues in Norwegian music: nineteen albums, an open door to genre, and her voice almost always at the centre. She has worked with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Jenny Hval and the Oslo Sinfonietta, and has long reworked other people’s songs, Joy Division and Henry Purcell among them. We’ve shared her singing Joy Division before, too: a live take on Wilderness, filmed at St. Edmund’s Church in Oslo.
The cover lands in a busy year. Her label, SusannaSonata, turns fifteen in 2026 and is marking it with three new albums, among them the experimental vocal duo Propan with tape queen Stina Stjern ‘Shrew’, Norwegian explorative saxophonist Espen Reinertsen’s electronica album ‘Venus er i håret’ and Susanna’s old partner in Susanna and the Magical Orchestra Morten Qvenild’s second solo album ‘Lokalt Piano’.
Her own 2026 has moved through duo, trio and band settings, including 2024’s Meditations on Love and a new project drawn from the writings of the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Later in the year she revisits Baudelaire & Piano at the Hamsundays Festival and takes Baudelaire & Orchestra to the Ultimafestival with the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra.
Tour dates:
August 5th — Susanna ‘Baudelaire & Piano’ Hamsundays Festival, Hamarøy (Norway)
September 8th — Susanna Wallumrød & Juhani Silvola Lillebull Scene, Bergen (Norway)
September 9th — Susanna Wallumrød & Juhani Silvola MIR, Oslo (Norway)
September 17th — Susanna Wallumrød & KORK, Ultimafestivalen, Oslo (Norway)
October 4th — Susanna Wallumrød & Juhani Silvola Larvik Vinylklubb, Larvik (Norway)
November 25th — Susanna Wallumrød & Harald Lassen Josefine Viseklubb, Oslo (Norway)
More: https://susannamagical.com/