Ketil Bjørnstad & Sandra Lied Haga Release First Single from the Album The Gateway

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The album emerged from an intuitive meeting between two musicians who share a profound understanding of music’s gravity, beauty, and expressive power. In the duo format, the essence comes into focus: melody, tone, and intimate musical interplay.

Solution is a key piece in the album’s musical narrative. While the opening movement, Til Sandra (For Sandra), points toward wonder and searching, Solution represents a sense of resolution, relief, and reconciliation.

“The Gateway is a suite that can be interpreted as a collection of mini-novellas. Solution is intended as a resolution, a relief, a hope. It is the major-key version of the opening movement Til Sandra, and is strongly inspired by Brahms’ late piano pieces, which I have lived with all my life. An intermezzo that looks both backward and forward, and which Sandra performs with a melodic and dynamic understanding that any composer could only dream of. Those were some unforgettable minutes in the studio,” says Ketil Bjørnstad.

Throughout his long artistic career, Bjørnstad has remained devoted to melody and harmony as the essential foundations of music. In meeting Sandra Lied Haga’s distinctive sound and expression, this artistic ideal is given new life. Haga’s playing is marked by a rare combination of technical precision and deep musicality, where every phrase is shaped with clarity, intention, and intimacy.

The Gateway consists of twelve movements composed during an intensive period in late summer 2025. The music is written, yet remains open, allowing room for improvisation, breath, and spontaneity. The album was recorded at Propeller Studio in Oslo, where the duo captured a rare moment of musical presence and connection.

The album title points toward the core of the project: a transition, a movement from one space into another. With more than forty years between them, Bjørnstad and Haga create a musical space where generations meet and dialogue remains at the centre.

Solution offers a first glimpse into this landscape - a quiet, melodic, and deeply human encounter between experience and curiosity, between the established and the new.