Wojciech Kilar Missa Pro Pace

The Ninth Gate, Roman Polanski's supernatural thriller about a book that can summon the devil, features an appropriately tense and eerie score by Wojciech Kilar, who also composed the award-winning music for Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sumi Jo's ethereal, operatic vocals grace "The Theme From The Ninth Gate," and the City of Prague Philharmonic and Chorus lend a brooding, Old World feel to pieces like "Corso" and "Bernie Is Dead." Piano and strings contribute to the ghostly, romantic aura of "Liana," while "Plane to Spain," "Chateau Saint Martin," and "The Motorbike" add to the score's continental atmosphere. Suspenseful in its own right, Kilar's music for The Ninth Gate reaffirms his skill as a film composer.

Francis Ford Coppola took an inspired gamble in hiring the Polish composer to realise his Gothic stage production made for the cinema screen. Nothing about Kilar conforms to Hollywood. His classical works and earlier European films for the likes of Polanski and Zanussi, show a style based upon a repetitive form that insinuates itself upon the ear until it becomes unforgettable. "Vampire Hunters" is a superb example, being a cyclic string and brass motif that develops an exciting dynamic by revolving between keys. A pounding drum keeps time and rhythm for a flawlessly edited scene of destroying the vampire's lair. There is also the exquisite theme for Mina and Dracula, which in "Love Remembered" is presented on the composer's favoured instrument, flute. Again, it's through instrumental interchange across repetitions of the theme that the piece achieves its effect. A little sound design ("The Ring Of Fire") offers pause before the tender choral dénouement. Despite the tail-end pop song, this was a blockbuster debut without precedent.

Director Roman Polanski's film The Pianist is based on the memoirs of Polish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman about his harrowing experiences under the Nazi occupation of Warsaw during World War II. The soundtrack album consists almost entirely of Chopin piano pieces, most of them played by Janusz Olejniczak. Most of those, in turn, are solo performances, although Olejniczak is joined by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Tadeusz Strugala, for Grand Polonaise for Piano and Orchestra. The sole non-Chopin track is the excerpt from Wojciech Kilar's score, "Moving to the Ghetto October 31, 1940," a klezmer-like piece running only 1:45 in which Hanna Wolczedska plays clarinet, accompanied by the Warsaw Philharmonic. Appropriately, the album ends with an actual recording by Szpilman of the Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 17, No. 4.

Niccolò Jommelli was one of the most sought after composers of his time, but finally accepted to become musical director at the court of Stuttgart in 1753. Three years later he composed his Requiem to commemorates the recent death of the Duchess von Württemberg, mother of his patron, the Duke Carl Eugen.. Despite the fact that Jommelli owed his fame almost exclusively to his operas during his lifetime, the Requiem became his most famous work after his death; the almost one hundred handwritten and printed copies of the entire work or fragments of it that have survived in some seventy libraries throughout Europe, some also in the USA, bear witness to this. Whilst the score and parts of the first performance have been lost, we can still form a reasonably good idea of the original instrumentation thanks to a surviving list of payments made to the musicians. We know that there were eight singers (one female and seven male) in addition to Jommelli.

Jordi Savall - Cristóbal De Morales (ca.1500-1553) - Officium Defunctorum & Missa Pro Defunctis (1992) {Astrée-Naïve ES 9926 rel 1999}
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© 1992, 1999 Auvidis / Astrée / Naïve | ES 9935
Classical / Renaissance / Sacred

Morales's five-part setting of the Requiem is one of the masterpieces of the 16th century and was actually published twice during his lifetime. The 'Missa pro defunctis' follows the customary pattern of the time. Each section begins with a unison Gregorian intonation, which then continues as a cantus firmus in the upper part as the other voices spin a polyphonic texture underneath. The work avoids obvious madrigalisms, but maintains an austere, meditative texture, which is both spiritual and moving.