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ALVA
Love Burns In Me
Beautiful Jo BEJOCD-40
Alva - known until recently as Alba - are singer Vivien Ellis and fiddler Giles Lewin. Both are in the Dufay Collective (check the Early Music racks) and have long worked across the unmarked borders between mediæval and traditional music he with After Hours and the Carnival Band, she with Sinfonye (where Stevie Wishart and Mara Kiek have also served).
This set is a mix of songs and tunes from Britain and France, and a very nice job they make of them all. Lewin is an intuitively sympathetic accompanist on both early and modern instruments and Ellis has a simply beautiful voice. I'm a pushover for songs in French and C'est En Mai is a particularly affecting example, compellingly performed. Next up is Cuckoo's Nest whose lyrics are some way from the refinements (if perhaps not the objective) of courtly love, and its English-language verses are rounded off with some adroit Gaelic mouth music. It's a tribute to their lilting performance of Fair Annie that I had no idea it lasted ten minutes while the unaccompanied I Love My Love is set to the tune of Blackwaterside and contains just about every floating lyric in English folk music. From the Shetlands, King Orfeo is one I hadn't heard since Archie Fisher did a big production number on it in the '70s, so all credit for selecting uncommon material. After that it's 13th century Occitan for the two closing tracks. Although the austere beauty of its melody is firmly in the early music camp, S'Anc Fui Belha's theme of illicit lovers forced to part at dawn has recurred through folk song (although neither of these two appears to be a revenant corpse) and on down to Dark End Of The Street.
There's always a danger that genre-crossing like this will satisfy neither musical camp. I have to take the mediæval side on trust - neither knowing nor much caring what might constitute authenticity in this field. It sounds great to me and, to quote Marie Lloyd, "If I likes a thing, I likes it. That's enough." With the traditional music, maybe Ellis can't quite snarl out a vow of vengeance the way June Tabor would (who can?) but I never once felt that the material was being smoothed down for the concert hall. Both performers are obviously right at home with folk music and playing it because they love it, the mediæval songs tug the heartstrings and they should count this record a great success. - Nick Beale
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