• Thursday 13 January 2011 - 20h30

Boreal Trio
Three men come from the north, that north of Europe so rich with musical traditions, for a concert in three beats: solo, duet, trio. 

First of all there is a curiosity, the nyckelharpa, a beautiful instrument inherited from the Middle Ages. It sounds like a baroque viola da gamba, and is related to the violin, the hurdy-gurdy and to the viola d'amore. Today, it is fitted with three melodic strings, twelve sympathetic strings, a drone string, three rows of fingerboards and a bow. Johan Hedin learnt how to play it with the old masters before attending music school. His partner Pelle Björnlert, a fiddler in love with the forgotten repertoire, is the idol of fiddlers.
Lastly Erik Pekkari excels at the accordion (two rows of buttons) as well as the zither. 
The repertoire is essentially made up of dancing tunes from the southeast of Sweden, polskas, which were very fashionable in the eighteenth century, and of gammaldans, nineteenth-century dances. That music from the far North is well worth discovering.

Jacques Erwan