
In many Nordic countries, light is celebrated at the summer solstice. Probably the best known is the Swedish “Midsommar” festival, which has become famous through many references in novels and thrillers. But other Scandinavian and Baltic countries also celebrate the solstice, so does Norway. The birthday of John the Baptist is celebrated here under the name “Sankthansaften” on the eve of 24 June.
The actual tradition of midsummer celebrations goes back to pagan rituals in which fires were lit to drive away evil spirits. Magical powers are attributed to this particularly bright night and flowers and leaves are also said to have special protective powers. The interplay of old and new traditions and rituals is important to Norwegians and is lovingly seen as an embrace of the past and the future.
Adorned with flowers and dressed up, everyone comes together to hold this legendary ceremony. People dance and sing around a big fire to celebrate the event and welcome the summer. Of course, music plays a major role in traditional festivals and rituals. By combining new and traditional music, many musicians from Norway bring this mythology and mood into the present day and manage to close this “embrace” musically.
The Norwegian label 2L is known for its outstanding music productions on Blu-ray, which is why we would like to present a few titles to you to coincide with the summer solstice.
Cantus, Tove Ramlo-Ystad – Yggdrasil
The album Yggdrasil is a fascinating exploration of the concept of the world tree in Norse mythology, interpreted through the music of the Norwegian women’s choir Cantus and its director Tove Ramlo-Ystad. The album contains a selection of a cappella music by composers from Norway and other countries and showcases the choir’s unique voices and the excellent sound quality of the 2L label.
Recorded at Lademoen Church in Trondheim, the album offers a wide range of compositions, from simple, melodic and tonal pieces to more complex and structured works that include spoken or vocal passages. The music draws on the richness and complexity of Yggdrasil and offers a great variety of musical expression and content, interpreted by the composers in their own way.
Yggdrasil is Cantus’ third album on the 2L label, following the success of SPES and FRYD, both of which were nominated for GRAMMY in the Best Immersive Audio Album category.
This year, the album also impressed the jury of the VISIONS OF SOUND AWARD 2024 and was chosen as the winner in the classical/choir category.
The jury says: “Once again a great sound experience, the most precise presentation of the polyphony, transparency and a fantastic overall sound.
Trio Mediaeval – Solacium
Trio Mediæval’s collection of hymns and lullabies – intimate songs as old as time and as new as the future: this is music without borders, celebrating our common humanity. We will never know the first song or the first singer, and we will never know what they sang about. But if time could be turned back and we could hear it, we might witness a mother or father singing the first lullaby. When we sing a hymn or a lullaby, we become a link in a chain that began in the uncertain past and extends into the infinite future: a timeless continuum of comfort and consolation.
The new lullabies by Anders Jormin and Sinikka Langeland originated in their minds as little musical gifts for real children, and are sung here for us all by three singers who have sung many a lullaby to their own children, assisted by Trygve Seim and Mats Eilertsen, who are both fathers.
The Trio Mediæval was praised as a “fascinating journey with music of timeless beauty”. The highly acclaimed first album Words of the Angel from 2001 led the group into the elite circles of early music ensembles and made them known to a broad international audience. Founded in 1997, the Grammy-nominated vocal ensemble features founding members Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Anna Maria Friman, and Jorunn Lovise Husan, who joined the group in 2018. The trio Mediæval has already recorded eight albums for ECM Records. Solacium is their first release on the Norwegian label 2L.
STEMMEKLANG - Tomba sonora
Tomba sonora is a site-specific music project for the Mausoleum at the Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Oslo. The mausoleum is located in a huge crypt, whose reverberation time played an important role in the conception and composition of this music by Kristin Bolstad. The special frequency response of the room and the resulting overtones were actively utilised for the composition. The positioning of the singers and the direction of the sound are just some of the many ways in which the acoustic properties of the space are creatively utilised to shape the flow and movement of the music.
Oslo Kammerkor - Veneliti
The composer Ørjan Matre has been working with the Oslo Chamber Choir for over a decade. For Veneliti, his sonic interpretations of Norwegian folk songs – fervent hymns, mystical legends and bittersweet love songs – have benefited from the choir’s strong folk music traditions. By returning to the sources of the songs and the way they were traditionally sung, Matre has preserved their core identity and given them new life and meaning in his sound world. Recorded here in immersive sound, you, the listener, take part in this world as if you were sitting in the choir yourself.
The music you are about to hear has travelled a long way before it finally reaches your ears. It includes fervent hymns, mystical legends and bitter love songs. Where exactly the journey began, however, is not easy to say, but along the way the songs gain new life through the people who sing them, each time with a slightly different form, a different feeling, perhaps a new purpose – but at their core they remain the same.
Unni Løvlid has taught the choir in traditional singing styles. By learning by ear and not by reading the music, the singers have acquired a different kind of “ownership” of both the music and the lyrics. In addition, this approach allows the singers to bring more of their own personality into the music. In the live performances, conductor HÃ¥kon Daniel Nystedt has continued the after-ear approach, creating a holistic expression in which the uniqueness of each voice becomes clear.
A producer with a special ear is needed to convey both the identity of the songs and the versatile qualities of the choir on such a recording. Morten Lindberg’s pioneering approach to recording techniques and immersive audio captures the complexity of this sound in a way that would have been impossible just a few years ago. As a result, Venelity has a consistency, with Matre’s dreamy interludes ultimately connecting the different modes of expression and disparate soundscapes.