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Written in fRoots issue 361, July 2013


DJØNNE & BORSHEIM
Toras Dans
Fivreld FIV02 (2013)

JORUN MARIE KVERNBERG & ØYVIND SANDUM
Tidens Løsen
Ta:lik TA1 10CD (2012)

SANDÉN-WARG, BERGLUND, RYDBERG, LUND, GORSET, CLAESON
Schodsbergs Notebok
Ta:lik TA92CD (2012)

If elegant guitarist, hardanger fiddler and poised singer Annlaug Borsheim were British and singing in English, she’d be a doyenne of the new UK folk wave, and indeed her last CD, November, was recorded in Scotland with well-known Scots folk musicians.
Over the past couple of years Annlaug has been performing with Norwegian champion diatonic accordionist Rannveig Djønne, a leader among the new breed of subtle players who are raising the instrument’s value and esteem in Norwegian traditional music.
Here on their debut duo album they gel finely in a luminous set of traditional and their own songs and tunes rooted in their native Hardanger. It will doubtless feature in this year’s Norwegian folk awards.

www.musikklosen.no, UK distributor Proper

     Gamaldans music – the central European couple-dance musical forms such as polka, waltz, mazurka and reinlender that arrived in Norway in the 19th century – has in recent decades been the preserve of usually insensitive and unimaginative bands, dominated by big accordions with guitar and bass, smiling in tacky photos on garish album sleeves.
     Mostly it still is, but lately some of the younger musicians in the traditional music revival, which instrumentally has been largely an arena of the older, subtler Norwegian dance musics such as springar and halling, have begun to look again at the derided gamaldans and approached it with more sensitive playing, in which the fiddle regains at least equal position with the accordion and the music becomes more worthy of listening than simply a dance-supporting oom-cha.
     Majorstuen, Tindra & Unni Boksasp Ensemble fiddler Jorun Marie Kvernberg was turned on to gamaldans by coming across first a cassette of, and then in person, fiddler Ole P. Blø (1920-2010) from the island of Midøya, who played these tunes all his life. She was much taken by his playing and its subtleties, and this CD, in which diatonic accordionist Øyvind Sandum joins her, is the result. The music and the packaging have a sepia-toned, period feel; the playing is finely light and delicate, far from the bland brutality of most gammaldans bands but much more dance-inspiring and pleasant to listen to.

www.talik.no, UK distributor Discovery

     In the days before radio, fiddlers in Norway, as in Britain, would often play tunes from a mixture of genres, and jot them down in their music notebooks.
     That’s what Johannes Nielsen Schodsberg, of Østfold county, did during the 1820s. For Schodsbergs Notebok Daniel Sandén-Warg and Mats Berglund play, on fiddles, moraharpa and octave hardanger fiddle, nine tracks of the paalsdanses, riils and a wedding dance he noted down in fluent pen-script from his local tradition. Then a quartet of baroque violin, flute or recorder, guitar or theorbo and cello play, in the classically-influenced, harmonised, arranged style of the time, twelve in his manuscript book that came from the wider Europe: minuets, quadrilles, waltzes, marches, a reel, and a recognisably English engelsk dans.

www.talik.no, UK distributor Discovery


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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