Secular Hymns

The Choir of Royal Holloway have proved themselves as inspirational performers of contemporary Baltic music through their previous recordings. The main work on this fascinating album is based on Estonian folk hymns, an unusual variant of folk melodies, collected in the early twentieth century for the first time by Cyrillus Kreek, who was the Estonian equivalent of Bartók or Grainger. Most of these religious folk songs were originally eighteenth-century Lutheran hymns which have been passed across generations and embellished with elements of secular folk-singing. During the Soviet regime, the singing of these religious songs was forbidden and this cultural genre was all but forgotten. By the end of the twentieth century fresh light could be shone on these folk collections, and Tõnu Kõrvits (born 1969) was particularly struck by the fresh possibilities and newly discovered meanings of folk hymns. In writing Kreek’s Notebook Kõrvits pays homage to Cyrillus Kreek while presenting a contemporary view of folk hymns. Although there is a dramatic unity to this eight-movement work, there is much diversity in timbre and scoring. The effect is improvisatory in the creative ornamentation of the vocal lines, and suffused with dreamy textures that bring to mind the great tradition of Eastern European choral writing.

This final LOiseau-Lyre set presents some of the most significant Medieval & Renaissance albums recorded by one of the most authoritative Early Music labels.

These new CDs are not being introduced as a simple addition to the consumer market, as they were produced with the consciousness that authentic Byzantine melody is not music intended for popular consumption, nor can it become an object of commercialization. On the contrary, Byzantine music belongs to the realm of transcendence. It is word [logos] in musical form, the word of revelation and disclosure of truth and the experience of the Church that is not related to the provocation of the senses, emotion, pleasure, or delight. The beauty, therefore, of Byzantine music does not have an aesthetic basis, but rather an ontological one, which imprints and defines this beauty in both an iconic and Eucharistic fashion in the Divine Services.

Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Roman Catholic hymn to Mary. It has been variously attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi and to Innocent III. There are two Stabat Mater hymns, one the Stabat Mater Dolorosa is about the Sorrows of Mary, the other, Stabat Mater Speciosa joyfully refers to the Nativity of Jesus. The title of the sorrowful hymn is an incipit of the first line, Stabat mater dolorosa ("The sorrowful mother stood"). The joyful hymn refers to "The beautiful mother stood". The Dolorosa hymn, one of the most powerful and immediate of extant medieval poems, meditates on the suffering of Mary, Jesus Christ's mother, during his crucifixion. It is sung at the liturgy on the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows…