Eilov

Mountains, glaciers, fjords – this is the landscape of Jølster in western Norway, just north of Bergen, where Gro Marie Svidal grew up, immersed in the Hardanger fiddle tradition. She learned the dances and tunes from master players, and her love for the music and the communicative power of the instrument itself shines through everything here. An album of solo fiddle tunes may sound forbidding, but you’re reckoning without the powerful rhythms, the hypnotic beauty of the sounds, the drones, and the resonance of the sympathetic strings. An ingenious sequence contrasts a century-old ‘Wedding March’ by a local fiddler with the pensive melancholy of a tune for the bride as she dresses for her wedding. Then two hallings, the exuberant wedding dances for the young men, and a springar – the couple's dance. The latter is the powerful tune Svidal kept to herself for years, before using it to win Norway's national folk championship in 2014. We hear another side of the instrument in ‘Summer Evening in Jotunheimen’, a tune in the form known as the lydarslått, and there's more improvisatory freedom and a new warmth of expressive colour. The album ends with a haunting folk tune, fading wistfully to almost nothing. Preservation and continuation, tradition respected and renewed.