Bach, Henryson, Sandström - Dansa

The Guardian 80

Cecilia Zilliacus (violin), Lena Willemark (voice)
(BIS)

The theories of Professor Helga Thoene about the influence of chorales on Bach’s famous Chaconne have been explored before on disc, by the pure-voiced Hilliard Ensemble on the 2001 ECM album Morimur. This is odder, wilder and more successful. Lena Willemark is a Swedish folk singer, and her chorales are a solo-voice wail, plangent and moving, that cuts across Cecilia Zilliacus’s admirable violin like an echo from a ritual past. Bach lies behind the other pieces: too literally in Svante Henryson’s Sonata, more subtly in Sven-David Sandström’s highly original Dansa, where voice and violin intertwine and for one movement a second violin joins the evocative texture with Bach quotations.