Hilliard Ensemble - Perotin (2000)

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Most of us who have ever heard the music of Perotin, a Parisian composer active around 1200, know it from the pioneering 1970s recording of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London, Music of the Gothic Era.

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1 Viderunt omnes, organum f
2 Veni creator spiritus, 3-
3 Alleluia, Posui adiutoriu
4 Maria virginei
5 Dum sigillum summi Patris
6 Isaias cecinit
7 Alleluia, Nativitas, orga
8 Beata viscera, conductus
9 Sederunt principes, gradu

The Hilliard Ensemble is a British male vocal quartet originally devoted to the performance of early music. Founded in 1974,the group is named after the Elizabethan miniaturist painter Nicholas Hilliard.

Although most of its work focuses on music of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, the Hilliard Ensemble also performs contemporary music, working frequently with the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and including in its concerts works by John Cage, Gavin Bryars, Giya Kancheli, and Heinz Holliger.
Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble’s inspired collaboration began in 1993 with the groundbreaking recording Officium and has resulted in consistently inventive music making ever since. At that first meeting Garbarek’s saxophone, soaring as a free-ranging ‘fifth voice’ with the a cappella Ensemble, gave the first indications of the musical scope and emotional power of this combination.

Most of us who have ever heard the music of Perotin, a Parisian composer active around 1200, know it from the pioneering 1970s recording of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London, Music of the Gothic Era. But here Paul Hillier and the Hilliard Ensemble, one of today's preeminent a cappella ensembles, take their turn with Perotin, and what a difference a few years makes. Munrow's recordings, while musically satisfying, were renowned in large degree for their novelty; Hilliard has taken Perotin's remote, intriguing music and turned it into something surprisingly compelling to the modern listener. This is music to set a mood: ethereal, hypnotic, sonorous, and deeply beautiful. Listening to Hilliard's Perotin, one can easily understand how this music sparked the imagination of Steve Reich and other contemporary minimalist composers. There is, remarkably, a stylistic affinity spanning eight centuries. The opening and closing works -- "Viderunt Omnes" and "Sederunt Principes," both four-part organa (a form of early polyphony) -- were written for religious celebrations at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and each is a tour de force of medieval music. Other, smaller-scale works of Perotin and his anonymous contemporaries fill out the middle of the recording, but the two great organa are the highlights, and one will be tempted to listen to them repeatedly. Slip this CD in your player, sit back, and let the centuries melt away.

Product Details

Release Date: 04/18/2000
Original Release: 1986
Sales Rank: 38,622
Label: ECM RECORDS
UPC: 042283775121