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Written in fRoots issue 285, 2007
 

LENA WILLEMARK
Älvdalens Elektriska
Amigo AMCD 757 (2006)

There’s a wonderful windblown wildness to Lena Willemark, in her thrillingly spirited singing, from a whisper to a shriek, in her great fiddling, and of course in the sky-piercing kulning - animal-calling – of which she’s Sweden’s queen.
      It’s all there on Älvdalens Elektriska.
      The electricity, by the way, is not in the instrumentation but in her performances, magnificently stark but warm, accompanied variously by fellow-fiddler Verf Lena Egardt, Mikael Marin on viola, Leo Svensson’s cello, Mikael Augustsson on bandoneon and accordion, and Haci Ahmed Tekbilek’s ney (end-blown flute) and mey (Turkish duduk).
      And Älvdalen is the valley where she was born and brought up in the village of Evertsberg, in the county of Dalarna. The essence of the material on the album comes from what she learned there, mainly from fiddler Ekor Anders.
      The album opens with her kulning, recorded outdoors, then the rich tones of a slow-paced dronal ensemble of bandoneon, deep cello and yearning, breathy ney slither in to underpin her intimately dramatic singing of Åsenpsalm. There are more with the ensemble, solo unaccompanied songs and herding calls, a reflective alternating conversation between her voice and her fiddle in what she describes as ‘blue music from Evertsberg’, and of course, this being Dalarna and she a fiddler, there’s a clutch of lurching, grace-note-wiggling Älvdalen polskas on solo fiddle, in duet with cello and in two fiddles and cello trio.
      She’s an extraordinary musician, and here as always gives living audio proof of the passion, high skill, depth and human warmth of Swedish traditional music.


© 2007 Andrew Cronshaw



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