Sinikka Langeland: Maria’s Song (ECM 271 7097)
It’s Not Jazz At All Occasion No.535 on this site, but it’s fabulous music so who gives a damn…

Langeland is a Norwegian singer and player of the kantele, a 15-string Finnish table harp. For this disc she is assisted by two classical players, Kare Nordstoga, playing the Baroque organ in Trondheim’s Nidaros Cathedral, and Lars Anders Tomter playing a four-century-old viola.

So, Langeland starts by singing, unaccompanied, a short traditional song called Lova Lova Lina. Then we hear Meine Seele Erhebet Den Werren from J S Bach, played on the organ. Then Langeland sings Ave Maria to a tune based on a medieval ballad and played on the kantele. Then we get Bach’s Suite No 1 in G Major, played on the viola, but its movements are interleaved with more medieval ballads… and so it goes.

There is a theme through all this and it is the Virgin Mary.

Langeland explains in her booklet notes: “Religious folk songs are among the most distinctive elements in Norwegian folk music, but the Virgin Mary is only represented with a few variants of [one] hymn… The reason for this is obvious: she was “reformed” away in 1537 along with a large number of beautiful church paintings and sculptures, and anyone who persisted in worshipping her risked harsh punishment. But the myth of the Virgin Mary lives on in the Norwegian folk tradition in the form of nicknames for flowers and in legends that are recounted on folk songs and sagas.”

That all gives the logic to this interspersing of folk songs with Bach, and in actuality it sounds all the more fitting. But also so fresh and innovative. To hear a strange Norwegian folk song and then a familiar bit of Bach, throws both into sharp relief and, in a way, makes the former sound more familiar and the latter more strange. And the contrasting sounds and timbres of Langeland’s unadorned, natural voice, the delicate pluck of the kantele, the richness of the viola and the grandeur of the organ, all go to make a thoroughly absorbing sound world and a very attractive place to inhabit for an hour.