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Written in fRoots issue 365, Nov 2013

SIGRID MOLDESTAD
Himlen Har Sove Bort Mørkret
Heilo HCD 7267 (2013)

GJERMUND LARSEN TRIO
Reise
Heilo HCD 7274 (2013)

Two Norwegian class acts, one a fiddler who’s blossomed into a singer and songwriter, the other a fiddler/violinist making new compositions that cross the traditional-classical divide.
     Since the duo Spindel with fellow-fiddler Liv Merete Kroken, Sigrid Moldestad has struck out, writing attractive songs, playing fiddle and hardangerfiddle, and gathering round her on record and live an elegantly integrated band of leading players on guitars, viola, banjo, harmonium, piano, bass and drums. She played a gig of great charm with this band at London’s Kings Place three years ago, and that’s well reflected in her third solo album, whose title translates as ‘Heaven Has Slept Away The Dark’.
     All the songs, except for two traditional, a setting of a Danish poem and - following on from the three on her previous album - a translation of a Burns song, are her own, and though they’re of course in Norwegian they’re so shapely, and the arrangements so well crafted, that it’s an album able to cross language barriers. Anyway, this is a world music magazine, right?
     www.sigridmoldestad.com, www.grappa.no

Gjermund Larsen was a member of Norwegian fiddle band Majorstuen and Finland’s Frigg. Over the past few years his own projects have occupied so much of his time and focus he’s left both those, and he has his own trio, joined by Andreas Utnem on piano and harmonium and double-bassist Sondre Meisfjord. Reise is their third album
     Audible in his composition and playing are the melodies and styles of Norwegian fiddle and hardingfele music and the dark, reflective lyrical shapes of its folksong and folk hymns, harmonic and contrapuntal structures from classical music, and the soaring jubilance, melodic and rhythmic twists of Kaustinen fiddling (the latter echoed even more when Andreas Utnem switches from piano to that pillar of Finnish pelimanni music, the harmonium). But Gjermund Larsen is in no way generic; he’s a quiet, elegant, rich-toned original, one of Norway’s most important and influential violinists, to be highly regarded in both folk and classical spheres and forming an important bridge between them.
     www.grappa.no


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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