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Written in fRoots issue 258, 2004
 

RASMUS STORM
Dansk 1700-tals Musik #2
Nattergal CD03-01 (2003)

LARS LILHOLT BAND
De Instrumentale
RecArt 5982262 (2004)

Though the continued use of them had dwindled during the twentieth century, at least until the Danish folk music revival, eighteenth century Denmark had a considerable body of folk dance tunes, some of them particular to the country and many akin in style or melody to those of its neighbours and dance music repertoire popular at that time throughout western Europe.
Common were minuets, “Polish” dances, “English” dances, country quadrilles and marches. When the revivers went looking, they found many of them preserved in the notebooks of such as Rasmus Storm (1733-1806) and the Faroese Jens Christian Svabo (1746-1824).
      The folk band Rasmus (in no way to be confused with UK-chart-riding Finnish pop band The Rasmus) formed some twenty years ago to play this stuff. It made an LP in 1983; since then the five members have continued to perform as a group occasionally, and contributed tracks to the Tværs compilation and Per and Lars Lilholt’s Next Stop Svabonius project, but haven’t returned to full album-making until now with Rasmus Storm #2.
      The line-up is a totally string sound of four fiddlers - Ove Andersen, Lars Lilholt, Bent Melvej and Michael Sommer - with occasional switches to viola, octave violin or cello, plus double bassist Benny Simmelsgaard. All those years have given the group members a natural empathy with the music and one another’s playing of it. The sound is springy and airy, and though the shapes of the tunes don’t show the off-centre rhythmic leanings of Norwegian and Swedish fiddling, there’s a dancing Scandinavian silveriness to the grace-noting.

      Lars Lilholt has another long career as a hit song writer and leader of the very popular Lars Lilholt Band. De Instrumentale is a compilation of some of the instrumental aspect of that band’s repertoire between 1977 and the present. Their approach was influenced by Fairport and other primogenitors of the folk-rock boom, but Lilholt and his band applied it to Danish dance tunes learned from fiddler Otto Trads and the notebooks of Storm, Svabo and others, at a time when such music had virtually disappeared from the consciousness of young Danes.
      Over the years they’ve done it with increasing sophistication. The album, bearing a dedication to Dave Swarbrick, chronicles the evolution of the band’s sound and arranging skills into today’s powerful if, it has to be said, sartorially (one hopes it’s ironic) retro-posey, stadium-rock six-piece, and shows that, while folk-rock is often viewed as time-expired, in the hands of brand leaders it’s still a fine way to play the old tunes and have a large audience rise to them.


© 2004 Andrew Cronshaw


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