Paradisium. Serene Sacred Songs

The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning was the Word and that the Word was sound. But what if it was music? What if God, in contemplating the creation of Creation, sang being into being? If so, it might have sounded something like the Sacred Songs of Valentin Silvestrov. In this seventh ECM album devoted to the Ukrainian composer’s music, we thusly encounter a sense of space unique to the Russian liturgy: the more the voices unify in movement, the more they lift from one another like temporary tattoos, leaving behind mirror images that wash away with baptism into infinite oneness with the Holy Spirit. Sin as sun. Firmament as fundament.

Isabel Bayrakdarian is a certified classical music diva today, an excellent Mozartian, Handelian, songs and lieder recitalist and overall a very bright star in the current line-up of young sopranos. And this is how she started her recorded career- with a disc of Armenian liturgical music…

Tenebrae bring their trademark passion and precision to this live performance of music by J. S. Bach and Sir James MacMillan, to be recorded live at Snape Maltings in May 2023. Renowned for their technical difficulty, Bach’s motets are pillars of the choral repertoire, requiring minute attention to detail as well as a full emotional range. Here, Tenebrae performs the three most well-known of the set, culminating in the joyful Singet dem Herrn. Like Bach, Sir James MacMillan has written much of his music for the church, and his settings of the Tenebrae responsories paint a vivid picture of the events of Holy Week. This album also features the premiere recording of I saw Eternity the other night, which MacMillan composed for Tenebrae in 2021 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the London Bach Society.

The recording of this composer’s extraordinary vocal music was made at Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire, where this one-time organist to Charles I lived and worked for the Hatton family. Thanks to the kind permission of English Heritage, and the generous donations of so many of our supporters, we have the pleasure of bringing the forgotten composer of the English 17th century back into the light. The double album features all of Jeffreys’ works for 4 and 5 voices with continuo, including many world-premiere recordings. It is released on the Prospero Classical label: streaming services on 8 December 2023 & in physical form in February 2024 worldwide.

Valentin Silvestrov - Sacred Works (2009) {ECM New Series 2117}
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© 2009 ECM Records | ECM New Series 2117
Classical / Choral

Since 2001, ECM has enthusiastically championed the art of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov with recordings of his orchestral, chamber and vocal works – creations that stand as some of the most arresting and moving in contemporary music. This continues in Silvestrov’s 75th birthday year with “Sacred Songs”, the seventh album ECM has devoted wholly to the composer’s music; it collects sets of songs, refrains, psalms and prayers composed from 2006 to 2008 that reflect the composer’s late-blooming interest in writing for a cappella voices, which led previously to the ECM releases “Requiem for Larissa” and “Sacred Works”.