Folk dances and courtly music.
Valdres is a long way from Versailles, yet the folk music played on farms in the Norwegian valleys rings like an echo of the Baroque music played at European royal courts. Just ask Ragnhild Hemsing, André Lislevand and Jadran Duncumb, who tune all their strings and draw a bow from Norwegian folk tunes to French and Italian Baroque gems.
Like the folk musicians of Valdres, the masters of the Baroque were performers first and foremost. The Italians Marini and Matteis were violin virtuosos, and Kapsberger a wizard on the lute. Marais played the viola da gamba and Couperin the organ at the court of the Sun King. All of them played their own pieces, dazzling with ornament and improvisation. So did the musicians of Valdres, albeit with fewer wigs in the audience.
Baroque and folk music are both bound up with dance, and in their day bailiff and beggar alike took to the floor. Louis XIV whirled to Marais’s musettes in gilded ballrooms, while somewhere up in the valleys, as the folk tale has it, a young girl named Fanteladda danced herself to death. So perhaps Versailles is not so far after all.
With Echoes of the North, Ragnhild Hemsing presents a new artistic concept that explores encounters between traditions, expressions, and sound worlds in distinct ways.
Hardanger fiddle, lute and viol, folk dances and courtly music, all melt into a journey through musical styles in the great hall of Norway’s medieval kings: Håkonshallen.
Image: Ragnhild Hemsing. Photo: Alf Simensen
