A Christmas Album Even a Pagan Will Love
as will an agnostic; an atheist? That's pushing it!
I can't better describe this than the annotation's second sentence, but might as well begin with the first: "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."
Trio Mediæval—Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth, and Jorunn Lovise—are three women with angelic voices backed on this recording by a quintet of musicians playing: a kantele (a type of Finnish stringed instrument), harbinger fiddle and violin, trumpet and organ, double bass and the kind of percussion that rattles your windows but that doesn't happen until the second track, "Josefine's julesalme", which is sure to startle you from the blissful state the opening track will put you in, assuming your system goes deep. The deeper the better to deliver both the drums and the large reverberant space in which the recording took place.
Again I'll cheat and quote the annotation: "The album has a special focus on the Norwegian folk tradition (Josefines julesalme, Lussinatti lange, Frå Betlehem eit gjetord gjeng) and the less well-known Christmas hymns of the Swedish- speaking communities in Ukraine (En jungfru födde ett barn idag) and Estonia (In dulci jubilo)...."
There are Norwegian, Danish and Swedish hymns and folk melodies, a 15th century English carol, with all arrangements save for one, created by the musicians. The Trio has eight albums for ECM and performed around the world. If you're not familiar this record is a great place to start and this is of course the perfect time for this record (or SACD) to play on your system.
The sound is perfection: transparent, spacious (super spacious), three dimensional, full range top to bottom, and as good as recorded sound gets. Right now I'm playing it using a tubed preamp and amp but the other day through solid state it was equally stunning. I don't give out too many 11s for sound but this gets one for sure.
The pressing is dead quiet, flat and all you'd hope for. At least the sealed one I was sent was that way.
Last holiday season I recommended the 2023 vinyl release of Nick Lowe's 2013 somewhat tongue in cheek holiday album Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family. Yule is this year's recommendation from an agnostic.
One last note: the American distributor is NAXOS but the producer told me NAXOS has a three month lead time for new product and this missed the cut for this Christmas (which is sad) but that it can be ordered directly from 2L's webshop.
