Keel Road
Traditional Works, plus works by Turlough O’Carolan, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Sjølin
Danish String Quartet
ECM 4875885 49:22 mins
Twenty-one years young, the Danish String Quartet has had a huge influence in the musical world; I must say I will never forget joyously romping with the Arctic Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra’s take on their folksong arrangements in a Svalbard lavvo (tent). The sequence presented on this album is a multi-faceted diamond, nominally linking five northern nations on a sea journey (‘eel-road, seal-road,keel-road, whale-road’ is a line of Seamus Heaney’s paean to the ‘North Atlantic flux’). Special guest and citternist Ale Carr’s Stormpolskanand first violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen’s Gale Warning add unpredictable marine atmosphere to the mix, but onland humans remain to the fore. I wish the elegant but minimal presentation had given us the texts of legendary harpist’s Turlough O’Carolan’s character-ballads, but the spirit of them all is quite lovely, from the opening viola solo for Mabel Kelly to the extroversions of Carolan’s Quarrel with the Landlady and Planxty Kelly.
The heart is perhaps Once a Shoemaker, following on from an old field recording of the song on which it’s based; is it here we get the distinctive, introspective sound of the clog fiddle? The voices add magic; so does the whistling, adding extra pleasure to Sørensen’s exquisite violin playing in As I Walked Out. You’ll be sure to recognise Lovely Joan from the middle section of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves; how he would admire the strange harmonies towards the end. And the Norwegian traditional melody at the end brings warm humanity back to full strength. The mixing varies acoustics to good effect, and the discreet percussion effects in several tracks add to the poetry. I’m now longing for a date when I can catch this team in live action again. David Nice
