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Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble: Officium Novum(ECM)

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  • Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble: Officium Novum(ECM)

    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
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