Lindberg Lyd (2L), Released November 2024

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.

Guests musicians: Sinikka Langeland (kantele), Anders Jormin (double bass), Helge Norbakken (percussion), Vegar Vårdal (hardanger fiddle and fiddle) and Arve Henriksen (trumpet and organ).

Lindberg Lyd (2L), Released May 2023

The exquisitely decorated 15th century choir book known as the Old Hall manuscript was lost to history for the best part of 400 years until its reappearance in a Catholic seminary at the end of the 19th century. The largest surviving collection of medieval motets and mass movements, it immediately became the most celebrated source of English music of the period. It was written in the first instance by a single scribe to ensure that the music of his fellow singers was not forgotten. Many of them are known only from this manuscript, and on this album they find their voices again after more than half a millennium of silence, transformed by the singing of Trio Mediæval in the company of Catalina Vicens, alongside new music by David Lang and Marianne Reidarsdatter Eriksen.

Lindberg Lyd (2L), Released June 2021

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.

Guests musicians: Trygve Seim (sax) and Mats Eilertsen (double bass).

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NXN Recordings, Released April 2020

Consisting of texts from the traditional mass mixed, blended and contrasted with poems by the Norwegian writer Tor Ulven.

Mainly about what our memory consists of, after all the days lived, what images, what episodes remains in our memory!

Do we remember and emphasize the same, even if we do experience the same?

This contrasted by texts from the Mass; Agnus Dei, Sanctus, Gloria, Kyrie

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NEOS Music, Released March 2017

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ECM 2520, Released March 2017

Over several summers Trio Mediaeval and trumpeter Arve Henriksen spent many days together by the beautiful Dalsfjorden on the Norwegian west coast, and it was there that most of the music for this recording was born. Fascinated and inspired by Icelandic sagas, beautiful chants, folk songs, religious hymns and fiddle tunes, the quartet has arranged a unique set of songs where improvisation, mediaeval and traditional music from Iceland, Norway and Sweden meet the present. Henriksen has often performed with Trio Mediaeval in live settings – and the singers and trumpeter appear on Sinikka Langeland’s recent record The Magical Forest – but Rímur is their first extensive collaboration on disc. It was recorded in February 2016 at Munich’s Himmelfahrtskirche, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

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ECM 2448, Released July 2016

The colours of The Magical Forest glow in this remarkable recording which brings together Sinikka Langeland’s Norwegian-Finnish-Swedish Starflowers quintet with the singers of Trio Mediæval. It’s an inspired concept: the Trio Mediæval, with their affinity for folk music and their unique vocal blend, adapt themselves ideally to Sinikka’s sound-world, which is once archaic, timeless and contemporary. The quintet members, all bandleaders in their own right, are amongst the most characterful players in Scandinavia today, and Sinikka sets them free to improvise around her cycle of songs, built upon myths and legends of the world tree.

The Magical Forest was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in February 2015, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

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Louth Contemporary Music Society, Released 2015

"Just (After Song of Songs)" is a 2014 song written by composer David Lang. The song was performed by the Norwegian vocal group Trio Mediaeval. In 2015, it was adapted for use in the soundtrack for the comedy-drama film Youth, directed by Paolo Sorrentino.

The song is based on language from the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. It has received widespread acclaim from various news sources and music review websites, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and New York Public Radio.

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ECM New Series 2416, Released November 2014

Trio Mediaeval – three Scandinavian women whose singing produces "a sound of extraordinary and consoling beauty,” says the Boston Globe – offer a collection of polyphony from the medieval to the modern titled after the North Wind with their sixth ECM New Series release, Aquilonis. One can sense a reference in the title to the Nordic roots of the singers, as well as the bracing purity of their voices; moreover, the album’s repertoire travels from Iceland to Italy, from north to south like the Aquilonis wind. In creatively realizing Icelandic chant from the Middle Ages, Trio Mediaeval accompany their vocals with discreetly textural instrumentation. The group also arranged 12th-century Italian sacred pieces and sings 15th-century English carols, with timeless folk melodies in the air, too. From our contemporary age come works by the Swede Anders Jormin, American William Brooks and Englishman Andrew Smith. In his liner notes to Aquilonis, John Potter – former Hilliard Ensemble tenor and longtime Trio Mediaeval mentor – aptly describes the group’s ability to "create a synthesis of sound and atmosphere… history and geography blending seamlessly.”

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Cantaloupe Music, Released April 2014

Inspired by her love for the music and lore of Appalachia, Julia Wolfe based her text for Steel Hammer (called a “wild hybrid” by the New York Times) on over 200 versions of the John Henry ballad, exploring the subject of human vs. machine in the quintessential American legend. Featuring the haunting—and often haunted—vocalizations of Norway’s Trio Mediaeval, Steel Hammer also stretches the standard instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars with wooden bones, mountain dulcimer, banjo and more.

Steel Hammer is also now an exciting new evening-length theater work pairing Bang on a Can All-Stars with renowned director Anne Bogart and SITI Company.

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ECM New Series 2166, Released 2011

Oslo's Trio Mediaeval presents a reconstruction of a 13th century votive Mass to the Virgin Mary, based on surviving manuscripts from a Benedictine Abbey in the English Midlands. Inserted amid the medieval music are a Credo and Benedicamus Domino specially composed for this programme by Gavin Bryars: the old and the new intermingle in the work of this vocal ensemble. Anna Maria Friman: "The members of Trio Mediaeval feel that performing medieval music today gives us the freedom to let our imagination and ideas flow, as though we are creating contemporary music."

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ECM New Series 2003, Released 2007

After three very-well received recordings - Words of the Angel, Soir, dit-elle and Stella Maris - combining medieval sacred music and contemporary composition, Trio Mediaeval's newest project is a departure for the trio. Here the singers investigate their Scandinavian roots with a powerful and compelling account of Norwegian folk songs. On several selections they are joined by percussionist Birger Mistereggen, a specialist in the rare Norwegian folk-drum tradition. Though exploring new ground, the trio continues to display their universal appeal that communicates to an incredibly diverse audience.

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ECM New Series 1929, Released 2005

Stella Maris juxtaposes and seamlessly blends the old and the new. Chants from the 13th century, most of them from English and French Conductus traditions, are complemented by a new sacred composition commissioned by the Trio. Prior to her Missa Lumen de Lumine, Korean-born Sungji Hong had already written several pieces for Anna Maria Friman, whom she had met while studying at York University. Hong's Missa is a contemporary and explorative setting of the Mass Ordinary which displays a keen awareness of the Trio's distinctive vocal style. "We encountered quite a few rhythmic challenges at first," Anna Maria Friman recalls, "but we felt at once that this piece is really written for our voices."

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ECM New Series 1869, Released 2004

Trio Mediaeval made a powerful impact in 2001 with their debut album Words of the Angel, their highly distinctive "Scandinavian" vocal sound bringing something fresh to the performance of sacred music. Soir, dit-elle, with equal persuasiveness, reverses the ratio of old to new music... The uniqueness of their vocal blend has encouraged composers Gavin Bryars, Ivan Moody, Andrew Smith and Oleh Harkavyy to write new music for the three women singers. Contemporary works are here interwoven with the Alma redemtoris mass of Leonel Power, the great English composer and theorist who ranks alongside Dunstable as one of the defining forces of 15th century sacred music.

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ECM New Series 1753, Released 2001

Debut of an exceptional female trio from Norway singing music from the Messe de Tournai, plus motets and songs, as well as a collection of Laude, and the contemporary piece by Ivan Moody that gives the album its title. Formed in Oslo in 1997, the Trio Mediaeval studied intensively with the Hilliard Ensemble and shares the English group's sense of adventurousness and equal interest in early and new music. Their recording was produced by Hilliard singer John Potter.

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