Turlough O’Carolan, Danish String Quartet

CD version. Keel Road is the Danish String Quartet's third album of folk music, a crossing of the North Sea through traditional tunes from Denmark, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Ireland and England. It follows Wood Works (Dacapo, 2014) and the ECM album Last Leaf (2017). As the quartet puts it, folk tunes are "an important element of our identity as musicians". All the arrangements are the group's own, and new pieces by two of its members sit among the old material.

The players are Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (violins), Asbjørn Nørgaard (viola) and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (cello). Sørensen adds clog fiddle, harmonium and spinet, Sjölin plays bass, and all four sing and whistle; two guests add piano and cittern. The album was recorded in November 2022 at The Village Recording in Copenhagen, with Thomas Vang as engineer, and mixed in March 2024 at the Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich. Manfred Eicher was executive producer.

Four tunes by the Irish harper Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1738) run through the sequence, from the plaintive opening Mabel Kelly to Planxty Kelly. A brief field recording of the Danish song En skomager har jeg været leads into Sørensen's Once a Shoemaker. The English Lovely Joan is the tune Ralph Vaughan Williams used in his Fantasia on Greensleeves, and Stormpolskan is by Ale Carr, who plays cittern as one of the guests. The disc ends with the Norwegian song Når mitt øye, trett av møye, a melody that also appears in the work of Edvard Grieg.

In the New York Times David Weininger wrote that the members' own tunes are "so idiomatic you could easily mistake them for being 'authentic' folk music". He also heard an almost Beethovenian depth in the closing Norwegian song, where sadness and joy turn into each other. David Nice in BBC Music Magazine called the sequence "a multi-faceted diamond, nominally linking five northern nations on a sea journey". David Kettle of The Strad praised the inventive arrangements and the warm, close sound. In The Arts Fuse, Jonathan Blumhofer singled out the medley of Marie Louise, The Chat and Gale Warning.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2785, released on 30 August 2024.