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Written in fRoots issue 298, 2008
 

RAGNHILD FUREBOTTEN
Endelig Vals
Ta:lik TA34CD (2007)

Highlights of last September’s Folkelarm traditional music promo event in Oslo were a couple of sets, one in a theatre, the other as we ate in a white wooden antique shop cum café, by Ragnhild Furebotten’s trio. Norway’s roots music scene is hardly short of excellent fiddlers, but this group has a special bright-eyed, infectious energy. It’s an ideally balanced unit, blending Furebotten’s great command of tone, light dancing lift and communicative delight in playing the fiddle with the extreme articulacy and subtlety of Gjermund Larsen’s cello, viola and fiddle and Frode Haltli’s never brash accordion.
      Her debut album, Endelig Vals, features the same line-up, and captures the same spirit and richness of sound and material. It’s named after a memorable and shapely waltz, one of four of her own compositions in a set full of strong melodies ranging in pace from the deep darkness of a Saltdal folksong tune, through reinlender, pols, light-touched Danish minuet, steaming polka, a reel closely related to Britain’s Harvest Home, a classic arrangement of the stately Brurmarsj From Sørfold, to a restless, twitching Furebotten polka that is by turns mischievously suppressed and exuberant, and to finish there’s an unlisted, cheerily uncool singalong recorded at a gig.

www.talik.no


© 2008 Andrew Cronshaw



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