The playhouse sessions

"Editor's choice - September 2022: I adored the first instalment of baroque songs and dances with a spit-and-sawdust twist from these freewheeling Norwegian musicians, and its successor - focusing on the Restoration theatre rather than the tavern, though the atmosphere of boozy disinhibition remains - is no less intoxicating. Highlights include a rumbustious set of sea-shanties, some rollicking reels, and an aria from Dido and Aeneas as you've never heard it before - I'd love them to give the whole opera the same treatment".

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"The Playhouse Sessions, on Rubicon, again sees the violinist Bjarte Eike and his Barokksolistene ensemble recreating the anarchic atmosphere of after-hours musical sessions in Restoration pub backrooms. This time the mix of exhilarating folk music and stylishly appropriated Purcell is loosely themed around A Midsummer Night's Dream ... Berit Norbakken sings an understated version of Music for a While with bassist Johannes Lundberg that wouldn't be out of place in a jazz club".

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"Editor's choice: Their debut recording was an all-out musical party, wild with dances, dalliances and drunken brawls. The follow-up is an altogether mellower and more polite affair but jas lost none of the original's joyful idiosyncratic spirit. Eike and his musicians swap the alehouse for the playhouse - almost ... The repertoire - a selection of English and continental folk songs and dances, many arranged by Eike, interspersed with bits of Dowland and Purcell - treads similar ground to 'The Alehouse Sessions' ... These are expert musicians who take off their professional hats and muck in as needed, playing multiple instruments and all singing both as chorus and soloists, creating a performance that may not be authentic in a strict historical sense but feels absolutely authentic to the spirit of the period and of players - as then, and as now".