Search - Hildegard of Bingen, Ensemble Organum, Marcel Peres :: Hildegard von Bingen: Laudes de Sainte Ursule /Ensemble Organum * Peres

Down to business

Yves Latorte | 04/05/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It is curious that 1997 produced two Hildegard von Bingen recordings at Harmonia Mundi let alone that both focused on St. Ursula! But, you probably couldn't have imagined two more contrasted but completely valid efforts. (Anonymous 4 was the other and their installment is very characteristic of them: highly feminine, luminous, surficially gorgeous and incomparably so). Marcel Peres plainly cites in the liner notes that a more authentic presentation was in order after years of perhaps trendy new age romanticizing of the deeply talented abess's work of 900 years ago. His presentation sounds like you are among actual initiates of her order, as opposed to modern voice professionals fancifully recreating it from the outside. This is made possible by deeper female timbres that are employed, a darkly echoic soundstage provided by Sylvanes Abbey, an overall favoring of von Bingen's biblical psalm settings, and the long linear drones by which they deliver many of them. Without much ornamentation at all, the natural polyphonic quality of the human voice becomes hypnotically obvious. This recording feels like serious practitioners trying to serve as von Bingen and her fellow sisters did day in and day out. Given that the Organum Ensemble is also a professional group like other interpreters, this is an especially convincing feat that palpably conveys what it is like behind cloister walls in isolation from a worldly world. In short, the joy is more penitential and comes through in the labor of the singing, not so much in the timbral light that results, even though Peres' handpicked six women vocalists are yet the perfect picture of pitch stability and synchrony. Features very brief inclusion of two male voices at the beginning and end of the 'ceremony'. Timeless and real in every sense of the words."