YULE
The celebration of YULE in Northern Europe harks back to a transition from ancient Pagan Germanic culture to the more formal spirituality of the newer Christian rite. Christmas, as we mostly now call it, gave us hymns, processions and chants, and in between, silence in church. Yule meant a vibrant pre-Christian secularity, with feasting and dancing, the noise of instruments and decorating the house with holly, ivy and mistletoe as a tribute to the gods of earth and air. Much of the music on this album dates from an earlier time when in a throwback to Yule churches were decorated with Christmas greenery, and at home there would be carols sung round a burning Yule log, the two traditions side by side. But the songs on this album are contemporary performances, a matrix where acappella voices meet improvising instruments in a synthesis of secular and sacred.
Featuring artists:
Sinikka Langeland, kantele
Vegar Vårdal, hardanger fiddle and fiddle
Arve Henriksen, trumpet and organ
Anders Jormin, double bass
Helge Andreas Norbakken, percussion
Morten Lindberg, balance engineer and recording producer
i want to live where you live
World Premiere (October 7, 2023)
Music by David Lang
Directed by Evan Chapman & Kevin Eikenberg
Four/Ten Media
Audio produced by Garth Macaleavey & David Lang
Audio recorded by Garth Macaleavey, East Side Sounds
Mastered by Nick Lloyd
Location: Kings Oaks, Bucky County, Pennsyvania
Trio Mediæval & Catalina Vicens
Concert in Corpus Christi Basilica, Kraków, Poland
6.18.2023
Festival Musica Divina/inCanto Foundation
Film/Photo by: Konrad Królczyk
Audio by: Kamil Madon
AN OLD HALL LADYMASS
LIVE AT WIGMORE HALL 2022
Trio Mediæval's collection of hymns and lullabies — intimate songs as old as time and as new as tomorrow: this is music with no boundaries, celebrating our common humanity. We'll never know the first song or the first singer, and we'll never know what they sang about. But if time could unwind and we could hear it, perhaps we would witness a mother or a father singing the first lullaby. When we sing a hymn or a lullaby we become a link in a chain that began in the unknowable past and will stretch into the infinite future: a timeless continuum of solace and comfort.
The new lullabies by Anders Jormin and Sinikka Langeland began in their heads as little musical gifts for real children, and are here sung for all of us by three singers who have sung many a lullaby to their own children, aided and abetted on this album by Trygve Seim, and Mats Eilertsen, fathers both.