The Hilliard Ensemble

25 years on from the release of Officium, the groundbreaking alliance of Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, comes Remember me, my dear, recorded during the final tour the group made in October 2014.
Named for the Scottish ballad which concludes it, the programme is emblematic of the range of repertoire the Norwegian saxophonist and British vocal quartet explored together from Pérotin, Hildegard von Bingen, Guillaume le Rouge, Antoine Brumel to Komitas, Arvo Pärt and more.

From Ockeghem born around 1420 to Lassus dead in 1594 via Josquin des Prés, this 8-CD collection presents almost two centuries of masterworks from one of the most extraordinary musical school, that could be compared to the Italian Renaissance in architecture or painting. The Hilliard Ensemble, founded by Paul Hillier in 1974 has championed this music with all the virtues of their instantly recognizable style and with a clarity and cleanness of timbre that are matchless.

… this new collaboration, whose familiar sound-world takes a slight sideways step into a more Eastern-influenced, Armenian direction, along with pieces by Pérotin and Arvo Pärt, offers a natural extension to the 1994 original. It's also strikingly beautiful, whether listened to attentively or as superior audio wallpaper. (Phil Johnson in The Independent, 12 September 2010)

The conceit that informs this disc is that Bach and Webern's meditations of life, death, and eternity are essentially complementary, that Bach's Lutheran faith and Baroque aesthetic and Webern's Catholic faith and Modernist aesthetic speak of a shared belief in the luminous and the numinous. Indeed, so pervasive is the conceit that complementary performances of Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercata in six voices from The Musical Offering opens and closes the disc. And so successful is the conceit that this otherwise tired trick is incredibly effective.

Johann Sebastian Bach - The Hilliard Ensemble – Motetten
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 326 MB | Full Artwork: 215 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: ECM New Series # 1875 | Country/Year: Germany 2007
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Vocal

"…Very little is known about the circumstances surrounding the composition of these motets, but as Martin Geck’s liner notes remind us, their significance in Bach’s oeuvre is on par with The Well-Tempered Clavier, equally monumental as examples of counterpoint and absolute harmony. They are, one might say, extra-musical insofar as they express themselves far beyond the words at their core, beyond the note values ascribed to those words, and beyond the constraints that pigeonhole them into meters and divisions. Rather, they lose themselves blissfully in the finer details of their flowering…"