An album of new music with very old words

Stef Conner voice & lyre
Hanna Marti voice & harp
Everlasting Voices, conducted by Jonathan Brigg

Over a decade in the imagining, Stef Conner’s new album Riddle Songs has been something of a dream come true to make – a prog-choral concept album in Old English, inspired the beautifully rich and sophisticated collection of riddles of the tenth-century Exeter Book, bringing together atmospheric, multilayered choral works with solo songs, and duets with the incredible medieval music singer, Hanna Marti.

You can order your copy now, from Delphian Records!

No songs in Old English have survived from the period in which the language was originally used. And yet everything we know of Anglo-Saxon culture – as preserved in written texts or rediscovered by archaeologists – presents a compelling, if tantalisingly incomplete, picture of a society in which the creative impulse was central. For Stef, this incompleteness is not an obstacle but a challenge … to rise to feats of imaginative daring which are also acts of informed historical sympathy. Riddle Songs is a concept album with a difference: a personal vision of a world just out of reach. Its music and its stories, its seasons and its creatures are addressed or conjured up in hymns, spells, and that most Anglo-Saxon of poetic forms – the riddle. Stef’s settings draw on English folksong, medieval music scholarship and a range of unlikelier inspirations to make something entirely her own. In around half the tracks she duets with early-music specialist Hanna Marti, both of them thrillingly poised between creation and rediscovery. In between come richly layered choral set-pieces, while elsewhere she is alone, accompanying herself on a strummed lyre. At the album’s heart is an intimate communion with our ideas of the past, of distance and of nearness, of knowledge and enduring mystery.

The People Who Made the Album Happen…

Riddle Songs could not have been made without the generosity of the project’s Kickstarter backers, who stepped in, with incredible generosity, to plug a rather large funding gap (recording choirs is expensive!), and then waited patiently, while recording issues, Stef’s perfectionism, and then the nightmare of Covid-19 delayed the release by a year! Thank you!

Extra-special thanks are due to the following people, who really went the extra mile to help this project happen: