Edda - An Icelandic Saga - Myths From Medieval Iceland / Sequentia
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Free Music Notes for Edda - An Icelandic Saga - Myths From Medieval Iceland / Sequentia
Free Music Review: Not so Icelandic
Hit: 3 Stars
Sounds like most of my other early music CDs. Not to say that it's bad, but I was ready for ax-wielding, berserking music, and this ain't it. Gee, most of it's in Latin. I guess I'll have to buy Beowulf or something on CD. 3-1/2 stars.Free Music Review: It Hurt My Head
Hit: 3 Stars
It was interesting stuff on the second listening, but the first time through was painful. Now I know why Bjork is such a space cadet.Free Music Review: How very polite...
Hit: 2 Stars
The Medieval world, if we are to believe the "experts" in "early music", was inhabited by a bunch of flakes. Come on, people, those were hard times, the people were tough, bawdy, too familiar with violence, sudden death, gore, and not unlike the masses today, would have been bored to death by such a limp rendering of their myths.I enjoy listening to Sequentia, I like their sound very much, but even if they satisfy the "experts", I don't take their albums as accurate reflections of how things were performed in olden times, this is simply way too polite. This cd, and the one they did some years ago of Medieval English
song, really get my goat up, they are offering us sterilised, palid husks of what are spirited and powerful songs, and do no justice whatsoever to the hardy generations that passed them down to us.
Now, I'm no expert, but to my thinking, you'll find more reliable renditions of north European Medieval song in the hands of modern folk groups (try early albums by Garmarna, a Swedish folk group, or St. Georges Canzona, or Misericordia, two "early music" groups with more gusto, for starters). Yes, these people are not purists, their influences will be more broad, language has moved on, and the instrumentation is not always going to be authentic, but these songs belong to the people, and evolve with them, breathe and grow, and yet the essence is there, the spirit kept alive.
Meanwhile, Sequentia, and a whole host of other "early music" ensembles, provide us with a shrivelled up corpse in a sealed container, and backed by the "experts", tell us that everyone back then was shrivelled up and lived in sterile jars.
I'd wager it wasn't so.