NEW ALBUM RELEASE
Billuca Ensemble
WILDFLOWER TALES
Billuca ensemble released their third album, wildflower tales, March 17.
twelve brilliant music tales recomposed and played by a wonderful norwegian classical/folk music crossover project.please Listen to the album in the Soundcloud-link above.
What happens when a Norwegian lullaby is mixed into de Falla’s classical song, Nana? Or when Purcell is mixed with Balkan rhythms, Brahms is played in shanty style, Grieg is mixed with both a herding call and the Bossa Nova, or when a fiery Italian baroque aria meets a traditional, Norwegian bachelor song? New tales arise from the good, old stories.
On this album Billuca Ensemble revels in a folkloristic remix of classical works. Since the ensemble was established in Trondheim, Norway, in 2003, the Billuca musicians have developed their own way of crossing chamber music from different centuries and genres from the 1500s to the present. This time the music of Monteverdi, Sartori, Purcell, Bach, Händel, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, de Falla and Frode Dyrli Angelsen, is combined freely with Norwegian, English and Irish folk music. The classical wildflowers are specially arranged and recomposed for Billuca by the ensemble’s own composers and arrangers, Tone Sand, Frode Dyrli Angelsen and Martin Smidt.
This repertoire was first presented in Norway in springtime 2016, and then on a concert tour in Piedmont, Italy, the following summer in a Norway/Italy-collaboration set up by the Italian Embassy in Norway. Our Italian audience then asked for a recording of the music – and here it is: The third Billuca album.
Musicians:
Kristina Olsen Smidt - soprano vocals
Hege Stokstad - soprano vocals
Tone Sand - flutes
Guri Krog Dodig - viola
Anne Lise Fagerli - cello
Frode Angelsen - guitars
Martin Smidt - drums and percussion
Henning Sommerro - guest vocal on "The Bachelor and the Diva"
Read more about the album and the musicians here
ØRA FONOGRAM, no. 115 (March.17.2017)