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JAN GARBAREK/HILLIARD ENSEMBLE: OFFICIUM NOVUM(ECM)
John Fordham
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 30 September 2010 21.59 BST
Buy the CD Jan Garbarek, The Hilliard Ensemble Officium Novum ECM
New Series 2010 Norwegian sax star Garbarek and the Hilliard vocal
ensemble have travelled from a largely early-music repertoire in the
early 90s to a more inclusively ancient-and-modern one today. The
story continues with this third album, launched in the UK tomorrow (2
October) at King's College Chapel in Cambridge. As the quintet showed
in St Paul's Cathedral last year, its freedom and flexibility have
grown over time, with Garbarek shifting from the solemnly reticent
jazz ambiance he brought to the early encounters to a relaxed mix
of early-jazz vibrato quivers (on the 19th-century Armenian hymn Ov
Zarmanali) and almost soul-sax earthiness (on Perotin's Alleluia,
Nativitas) here. The third-century Byzantine chant Svjete Tihij,
with its deep tenor-sax hoots and churning vocal lines, sounds like
a distant relative of Scarborough Fair, Garbarek's own Allting Finns
strikes a sharp contrast in its sliding harmonic ambiguities, and the
13-minute Litany is a fine balance of tranquil tonal contrasts and
episodes of exultant collective intensity. The Officium saga's many
admirers will be enchanted, though jazz-improv buffs may be less so.
From: A. Papazian
John Fordham
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 30 September 2010 21.59 BST
Buy the CD Jan Garbarek, The Hilliard Ensemble Officium Novum ECM
New Series 2010 Norwegian sax star Garbarek and the Hilliard vocal
ensemble have travelled from a largely early-music repertoire in the
early 90s to a more inclusively ancient-and-modern one today. The
story continues with this third album, launched in the UK tomorrow (2
October) at King's College Chapel in Cambridge. As the quintet showed
in St Paul's Cathedral last year, its freedom and flexibility have
grown over time, with Garbarek shifting from the solemnly reticent
jazz ambiance he brought to the early encounters to a relaxed mix
of early-jazz vibrato quivers (on the 19th-century Armenian hymn Ov
Zarmanali) and almost soul-sax earthiness (on Perotin's Alleluia,
Nativitas) here. The third-century Byzantine chant Svjete Tihij,
with its deep tenor-sax hoots and churning vocal lines, sounds like
a distant relative of Scarborough Fair, Garbarek's own Allting Finns
strikes a sharp contrast in its sliding harmonic ambiguities, and the
13-minute Litany is a fine balance of tranquil tonal contrasts and
episodes of exultant collective intensity. The Officium saga's many
admirers will be enchanted, though jazz-improv buffs may be less so.
From: A. Papazian