Stef Conner, Hanna Marti, Everlasting Voices - Stef Conner: Riddle Songs (2020)

Tracklist

01. Rune Poem 1 Torch - Stef Conner
02. Fire - Stef Conner
03. Flint - Stef Conner
04. Caute cane - Stef Conner
05. Hall-Joy - Hanna Marti
06. Rune Poem 2 Day - Stef Conner
07. Worldstead - Stef Conner
08. Caedmon’s Hymn - Stef Conner
09. Sainte Marie (Arr. S. Conner & H. Marti for 2 Voices) - Stef Conner
10. Rune Poem 3 Earth - Stef Conner
11. Seed Spell - Stef Conner
12. Sky Lights - Stef Conner
13. Rune Poem 4 Stars - Stef Conner
14. Flight - Stef Conner
15. Swan Lament (Arr. S. Conner & H. Marti for 2 Voices) - Stef Conner
16. Night-Bard - Stef Conner
17. Song-Pack - Stef Conner
18. Tide-Mother - Stef Conner
19. Ice - Elspeth Piggott
20. Rune Poem 5 Water - Stef Conner


This is an album of new music with very old words - a concept album with a difference: a personal vision of a world just out of reach. Its music and its stories, its seasons and its creatures are addressed or conjured up in hymns, spells, and that most Anglo-Saxon of poetic forms the riddle. Conners settings draw on English folksong, medieval music scholarship and a range of unlikelier inspirations to make something entirely her own. In around half the tracks she duets with early-music specialist Hanna Marti, both of them thrillingly poised between creation and rediscovery. In between come impressive choral set-pieces, while elsewhere Conner is alone, accompanying herself on a strummed lyre. At the albums heart is an intimate communion with our ideas of the past, of distance and of nearness, of knowledge and enduring mystery. No songs in Old English have survived from the period in which the language was originally used. And yet what does survive of Anglo-Saxon culture preserved in written texts or unearthed by archaeologists presents a compelling, if tantalizingly incomplete, picture of a society in which the creative impulse was central. For singer and composer Stef Conner, this incompleteness is a challenge to feats of imaginative daring which are also acts of informed historical sympathy.

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