Danish String Quartet

LP version. Keel Road is the third album on which the Danish String Quartet turns to the folk music of Northern Europe, after Wood Works (2014) and Last Leaf (2017). This time the route follows the North Sea, the old trade and travel lane between Denmark, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Ireland and England. Traditional tunes sit beside new pieces that two members of the quartet wrote in the same idiom. The group describes folk tunes as "an important element of our identity as musicians."

The quartet is Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland on violins, Asbjørn Nørgaard on viola and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin on cello. They made all the arrangements themselves, and all four also sing and whistle. Sørensen adds clog fiddle, harmonium and spinet, and Sjölin also plays bass. Two guests from Sørensen's folk trio Dreamers' Circus bring piano and cittern to Stormpolskan, a tune by the trio's cittern player Ale Carr. The album was recorded in November 2022 at The Village Recording in Copenhagen with engineer Thomas Vang. It was mixed in March 2024 at Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.

Four pieces come from the Irish harper Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1738), beginning with Mabel Kelly, whose melody opens the record over quiet wordless voices. The clearest idea of the album's method comes in a pair of tracks. A 43-second excerpt from an old field recording of the Danish song En Skomager Har Jeg Været leads straight into Once a Shoemaker, the piece Sørensen built on it. It starts in soft pizzicato under a single violin, and later the players begin to hum. The album ends with Når Mitt Øye, Trett Av Møye, a Norwegian traditional melody that rises slowly out of Sjölin's cello. The same tune also turns up in the work of Edvard Grieg.

That closing track drew the strongest responses. In The New York Times David Weininger wrote: "I remain at a loss to explain how these four musicians create such pathos from a simple old folk tune." For The Strad, David Kettle called it "a disc of quiet revelations", performed with "abundant spirit and conviction". MusicWeb International named it Recording of the Month. BBC Music Magazine pointed out that Lovely Joan is the melody Ralph Vaughan Williams used in the middle of his Fantasia on Greensleeves. Next to the quartet's Prism series of Bach fugues and Beethoven quartets on the same label, these folk albums show the other half of the group's identity.

This is the LP edition of ECM New Series 2785, released in 2024, with all fourteen tracks on two sides.