The vocal ensemble Trio Mediaeval will tour Ireland in April, with concerts in Navan, Dublin, Cork, Dundalk, Belfast, Clifden and Castlebar from 8 to 15 April. The Norwegian trio of Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Torunn Østrem Ossum combines medieval sacred music from England, Italy and France with Norwegian and Swedish folk songs, as well as works from contemporary composers. To date, Trio Medieval has five releases on the ECM label.

The Irish programme will include Gavin Bryars’ Benedicamus Domino, which was composed for the trio in 2008. Much of the programme focusses on traditional repertoire, such as a range of Norwegian folk songs, Greensleeves and a Lewis bridal song.

A review in The Journal of Music of Trio Mediaeval’s 2009 performance at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, likened the experience of their performance to being lost on the small back roads of Ireland:

I got spectacularly lost on the long drive down to Bantry. Having missed one of the crucial-but-invisible turn-offs, I found myself travelling through the back roads of County Tipperary. These narrow, twisting, grass-adorned lanes are an obstacle course, each curve obscured. A virescent wash, every stretch of hedgerows is in soft focus alike, yet infinitely varied in detail. At every moment, alert to the unexpected herd of cattle, gliding Land Rover or dead end, the gear stick in perpetual motion. This is thrilling driving, I think, as I lower the windows to a waft of silage: alert, unpredicable, consistent, real.

Trio Mediæval’s performance later that night was analogous, and equally joyous. Almost continuous from start to finish, medieval, Norwegian, contemporary and improvised musics were grafted into one. Happily, there was no programme or spoken introduction; with the limited faculty of my own ears, then, these elements were difficult to tell apart, sometimes only marked out by the language in which they were sung – Norwegian, Latin or no actual words being the variations. It didn’t matter: the correspondence of these music’s was exposed – separated by time and space, but joined in essence.

Read the full review here.

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