Varieties

Varieties opens with music that straddles British folk and baroque dance, before moving off in a very different direction: a 1730s hornpipe and two bourrées are followed by music from Iraq, Sweden and Poland. That this never sounds less than natural shows Alma's class. This understated string trio consists of a pair of fiddles (Emily Askew and John Dipper) and guitar (Adrian Lever); they imbue dance tunes – from jigs to mazurkas – with joy. There is good quality writing here too: one of those fine opening pieces, ‘The Great Hall’, is a lovely Elizabethan-style dance by Askew. The music from farther afield tends towards a less homogenous ensemble sound, with one of the fiddles often taking a dominant role (always with a bell-like clarity of tone). Sweden is a focus, a place to which Lever – whose guitar picking underpins every track – has a personal link: the Swedish influence is manifest in an original piece and two old tunes, including the culminating slow polska. But overall it's the English tunes that make this album. A couple of later numbers are especially enjoyable: the rhythmically knotty ‘Winterbourne’, by John Dipper, in tribute to a brook in his home village, and the off-kilter march ‘Kettle Drum’ from John Playford's The English Dancing Master.