Sigrid Moldestad
Biography
Steeming with energy, wit and musical intellect, fiddler and singer Sigrid Moldestad always leaves her audience and listeners hunger for more. Her music simmers with liveliness in one minute, unexpectedly changing to a melancholic state in the next. Appointed folk musician of the year in 2010, she is by far one of Norway’s most requested folk music artists. Her repertoire holds a large variety of songs and tunes, all delightfully conveyed through Moldestad’s magical music universe. Sigrid Mol...
Steeming with energy, wit and musical intellect, fiddler and singer Sigrid Moldestad always leaves her audience and listeners hunger for more. Her music simmers with liveliness in one minute, unexpectedly changing to a melancholic state in the next.
Appointed folk musician of the year in 2010, she is by far one of Norway’s most requested folk music artists. Her repertoire holds a large variety of songs and tunes, all delightfully conveyed through Moldestad’s magical music universe.
Sigrid Moldestad is recognized for her brilliant communicative skills equally using fiddle, singing and storytelling in her creative work. 2007 saw the release of her first solo album Taus (Silent) based on ancient stories about marginalized female fiddlers. The recording offered interpretations of traditional music as well as songs composed by Moldestad herself, amongst them the tune Samuline, a national radio hit described as “one of the most powerful songs of the year”.
The latest months Moldestad has been on the road introducing music from her latest album Sandkorn (Grain of Sand) released in early 2010. Sandkorn holds several of her own songs and instrumental tunes, as well as translated lyrics by the Scottish poet, Robert Burns (1759-1796). The songs are all clearly romantic, bringing to mind both the beauty and the tragedy in love.
“The songs are about love: the love you have experienced, the love you wanted to experience and of course the love that never happened!” Sigrid says.
On the album, and also on tour, Moldestad brings along a team of folk-blues-rock and hymn friends making music that goes further than the folk music genre. Nevertheless, folk music is always a strong undercurrent in her music as she always carries with her a strong influence from those deep Western Norwegian fjords and the towering mountains that surrounded her while growing up.
Sigrid Moldestad hails from the small village of Breim in Nordfjord, a region with long and strong folk music traditions. She started to play the fiddle at the age of 10 learning from some of the great masters in the district. Ever since she has been in the hunt for inspiration both in her home area and abroad. While studying she met Liv Merete Kroken with whom she established the celebrated duo Spindel. Later she joined the exceptional trio Gamaltnymalt with fiddlers Håkon Høgemo and Einar Mjølsens. Gamaltnymalt was awarded the Norwegian Grammy (Spellemannprisen) for their first CD in 2005. Two years later Sigrid Moldestad was given the same Grammy for her solo album Taus, and in 2010 she received a Norwegian Folk Music Grammy (Folkelarmprisen) for Sandkorn.
Band line-up:
Sigrid Moldestad | vocals, fiddle, hardanger fiddle
Anders Hall: fiddle, hardanger fiddle, viola
Sigbjørn Apeland | organ, piano
Jørgen Sandvik | guitar, banjo, mandolin
Anders Bitustøyl | doublebass
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