The Alehouse Sessions

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The Alehouse Sessions aims to capture the atmosphere and sounds of London at a time where the theatres were closed (thanks to Oliver Cromwell). You won’t be able to bring any bags over 40 x 25 x 25cm into the Queen Elizabeth Hall, so please leave large bags at home. That balances of bawdiness and reflections are the group's forte was obvious during their first stateside performance on 11 October 2017 at New York City's SubCulture.

This is a window into Cromwell’s tumultuous lock-down England where, under a cloak of moral guardianship, the Puritans have closed all playhouses and forced trained musicians to seek refuge in the tavern. YouTube sets this cookie to measure bandwidth, determining whether the user gets the new or old player interface.

Dreamed up and curated by Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike, “The Alehouse Sessions” takes audiences along on a 17th century evening of entertainment, not only with a live classical performance, but also through theatrical storytelling, folk, strings, improvisation, and dance. The rest – harmony, rhythm combination of instruments – is completely for us to reimagine, and it’s so liberating. Venue-provided beer in hand, they shared a toast with the audience before diving into a flow so evocative that “atmospheric” barely does justice to describing its escapist power.

Eike is a charismatic artist with a talent for conceiving imaginative live and recording projects … Innately theatrical, genre bending and suffused with great musicianship and string playing, this is a substantial and fine piece of work. I must admit that the prospect of a musical recreation of a long boozy session in a seventeenth-century tavern had me on high cringe-alert, but I'm so very glad I gave this a spin - the result somehow manages to feel authentic and contemporary at the same time (and had one of my most curmudgeonly colleagues dancing in his seat when he thought I wasn't looking). Watch Bjarte Eike and Barokksolistene perform ‘The Alehouse Sessions’ from the Czech Musica Pura Festival in 2019. There is a busking verve and jangle pop quality to these arrangements, each a study in dynamism and invigoration. If it has to be put in a historical context, the project draws its inspiration from the Shakespearian theatre where there was a direct communication between stage and hall- going in-between the story that was being told and occurring events happening in the hall.

The melodies are from the above mentioned collections like Playford, but it is our very own take on this music – and, it is in front of a camera. Beauty meets melancholy as rich hybrids of folk and classical bang heads with drinking songs, elegies, sea-shanties and bawdy ballads.

Since 2007 he and his Barokksolistene ensemble have taken over venues from London’s Middle Temple Hall to a motorcycle club outside Oslo (the bikers moved their Harleys out on to the street to make room). A new flowering of theatre music takes place, where masques and dumbshows rub alongside Shakespeare and commedia dell’arte in beautiful union. There’s humour and plenty of back-chat in the muscular shanties ‘Haul away Joe’ and ‘Pass around the grog’, fleet-footed folk fiddling and irresistibly syncopated rhythms in the Travel Set and the Canadian Set – each weaving together a sequence of traditional tunes – while ballads such as the lovely ‘I drew my ship’ (exquisitely arranged by Eike himself for soloist Tom Guthrie and cloudy strings, bright-flecked with harmonics) give welcome moments of pause and pathos.Eike and friends worked the stage like a knotted muscle into relaxation, proving at every turn that their brand of spontaneity could only be born of fierce training. A smattering of Purcell, dances from Playford’s Dancing Master, shanties, reels and ballads succumb to a nine-piece ensemble drawing on Baroque, jazz and folk styles for a no holds barred hooley. Beauty, improvisation, melancholy, bawdiness - Purcell, Playford and their European contemporaries bang heads with ballads, ditties, elegies, sea-shanties and folk song. Bjarte Eike’s Barokksolistene is an alchemical miracle of an ensemble, a collective of virtuosos whose instinctive, playful communication and delight in one another’s skill amplifies their individual performances, transforming them into pure musical gold.