Photo: Sigurd Slåttebrekk
About Sigurd
Sigurd Slåttebrekk returned to NMH in 2021, previously employed over a 10-year period as a piano teacher and researcher until 2010. Slåttebrekk's award-winning recordings with piano music by Maurice Ravel (chasingthebutterfly.no), Robert Schumann and Edvard Grieg have given him much international acclaim. In 2022, the Gramophone Magazine ranked his 2005 recording of Grieg's Piano Concerto as the best ever recording (in Norwegian).
Slåttebrekk's particular interest is romantic performance practice, as documented in early recording history. In Slåttebrekk's research project and publication Chasing the Butterfly (chasingthebutterfly.no), he undertook a systematic re-creation of Edvard Grieg's nine recordings from 1903 in a completely new approach to historical performance practice. This research method later became the foundation of several PhD projects internationally and marked the starting point of a new field of performance-based research at NMH.
Through multimedia productions for stage, film and, most recently, a theme park experience, his ambition is to reach out to new audience groups with the music of the highest quality, using innovative forms of communication, technology and cultural references that children of today can relate to. The Music Factory theme park attraction (aftenposten.no) at Hunderfossen receives the THEA Award 2024 (teaconnect.org) for the best attraction worldwide in the budget category below 10 mill USD.