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1. Henryk Mikolaj Górecki: O Domina Nostra, for soprano voice & organ, Op.55 21:28
2. Erik Satie: Messe des pauvres (Mass for the poor), for piano, chorus & organ 17:14
3. Darius Milhaud: Prélude 1 2:11
4. Darius Milhaud: Prélude 2 2:48
5. Gavin Bryars: The Black River 18:34
Chris Bowers Broadbent - Organ
Sarah Leonard - Soprano
AMG:"In the foreword to the score of O Domina Nostra, Henryk Górecki notes that the piece was written 'in gratitude for a 'dangerous journey' which had -- once more -- a happy ending.' This refers to a serious illness that plagued him throughout the early 1980s.
Górecki, like many of his Polish compatriots, is a devout Catholic, and the dedication to the Blessed Mary is particularly strong in Poland, where 'Our Lady of Jasna Góra' is the patron saint of the nation. O Domina Nostra, as its subtitle indicates, is a meditation for soprano and organ, with the text consisting of fragments of prayers to 'Our Lord' and 'Our Lady.' Upon these few words the composer constructs a monumental musical meditation, lasting thirty-five minutes (though no recording comes near that duration).
The score is pieced together from large blocks of distinct material, beginning with a lengthy organ solo. Over a D pedal, which continues throughout much of the piece, triadic progressions unfold, phrases repeating then leading on to something new. The pace is slow, but the dissonant relationship between these triads and the sustained pedal create a tension that isn't resolved until the end of the passage. At last, the soprano enters with a simple, modal melody over the pedal, which is repeated, and slightly expanded for several minutes. At that point, the voice shifts up to a higher range, the dynamics jump, the tempo speeds up, and the text shifts attention from 'Our Lord' to 'Our Lady.' Shortly thereafter, the dynamics are notched up even higher, the voice rises higher, and the organ finally moves off of the long-held pedal to join in on a thundering triadic progression supporting the melody. This outburst is heard once more, but separated by a rather dramatic passage for organ alone, another bitonal texture over a pedal on A flat (a tritone away from the original). The second occurrence of this solo carries on to eventually wind down, both in dynamics and tempo, breaking off for the first major pause of the piece. Górecki then returns to the 'O Domina' material, the slow, soft phrases over the sustained D. But this doesn't carry on for too long; the music shifts quite suddenly to something completely different. The final section leaves off the low pedal in the organ, at least for a while, and moves away from plain triads to extended harmonies reminiscent of Messiaen. The mood is gentle, with the vocal line very gradually opening out from a repeated single note intoning 'Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis.' As in the previous 'Our Lady' section, the organ plays an interlude before the voice is brought back, this time tying the two sources of invocation together by intoning 'O Domina' on phrases that carry on from the previous material. The organ closes the piece with a repeated, drawn-out two-note phrase over a sustained chord rooted on C sharp, a half step lower than the opening pedal. The score closes with several seconds of notated silence, no doubt to allow the music to resonate throughout the performance space (most likely a church) and die away (or ascend to the heavens, if you will).
O Domina Nostra is a deeply-felt, powerful work. Górecki exhibits a careful sensitivity to the relationship between the voice and the organ, as well as his natural feel for musical architecture appropriate for a sacred setting. It is no coincidence that the immediate predecessors to this piece are Beatus Vir (1979) and Miserere (1981).
Considering the life Erik Satie led, he could perhaps have dedicated the Messe des pauvres (Mass for the Poor) to himself; the composer lived in poverty and obscurity, his music known only to a few close friends during his lifetime. Darius Milhaud commented that 'our poor Satie, who died in poverty at the Hôpital St.-Joseph in Paris, could not have imagined the irradiation and diffusion of his work on the musical world of today.'
Satie was not necessary a man of religious faith, but he did have loose affiliations with fin-de-siècle quasi-mystical cults. Immediately following his five-year appointment as the official musician of the confraternity Rose-Croix du Temple et du Graal (a splinter group of the Rosicrucian Order), which reinforced the influence of the symbolist writers, he became involved with a yet more unusual sect of his own creation. While living on the rue Cortot, in Montmartre, he founded the 'The Metropolitan Church of Jesus the Leader'; he is thought to have been its only member. Contamine de Latour described the seat of the new Church as a 'nondescript room, square and tile-floored, which was untimely crossed by the...ventilating pipe. No altar, no object which could be used for the cult, nothing that reminded one of a religious sanctuary: simply the unfinished furniture brought down from the attic where it had been rotting for months and which gave to the room an aspect both of a monk's cell and of an NCO's room.' Within this 'wretched' atmosphere, Satie composed his Messe des pauvres in 1895. This strange work for solo organ and unison voices is reminiscent of the Medieval chant and of the transcendental idealism with which the composer was fascinated. Like other works from the first phase of his career, the modal motifs of the composition were derived from plainchant and possibly from Eastern cantillation. Moving mainly stepwise or pentatonically, the hypnotic repeated slices of melody suggest devotional liturgy, and are placed alongside meandering, sensuous harmonies. The structured patterning of phrases follows a mathematical, geometric order. The work has been compared by Edgard Varèse to Dante's Inferno, and was unlike anything produced by his contemporaries, even those with similar styles such as Debussy, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, and Chausson. This disturbing, even slightly scary work takes its listeners deeper into the mind and philosophy of its composer, whose lifelong interest in the metaphysical was made manifest in his music.
In 1932, Milhaud composed some incidental music for Claudel's mediaeval mystery play-like drama L'annonce faite à Marie (The Announcement Made to Mary). In 1941, a tour of the production was planned for South America. By this time, Milhaud was in California and unable to obtain his music from Nazi-occupied France, so he decided to write new music for the play. This second score was different from the first and quite austere in style. Unfortunately, this new music never reached the company in time. Overly suspicious censors, who were quite wary of the Latin texts used in the choral settings, held up the score. The composer was obviously fond enough of this score not to let it gather dust while waiting to see if it would be used for another production. In March 1942, he transcribed the Latin songs of Acts II and III for voice and organ and these became the Cinq Prières (Five Prayers). The instrumental interludes were happily transcribed for organ solo and are the Neuf préludes pour orgue, Milhaud's third opus for that instrument. As Paul Hindemith had done with the ballet Nobilissima visione, Milhaud, too, borrowed from the trouvère repertoire of the Middle Ages. Unlike Hindemith's score, which utilized but one trouvère melody, the second set of incidental music to L'annonce faite à Marie utilized quite a few of them. The Neuf préludes borrowed ten trouvère melodies, plus an old anonymous Provençal tune. The modes, meters, and rhythms of these pre-existent melodies formed a very important basis for the composition of the Neuf préludes. The Neuf préludes are like chorale preludes, especially in that for the most part, the entire melody is given out line for line (though, with the exception of 'Prélude VIII,' Milhaud does not repeat the first section of the tunes). These preludes attest to the composer's penchant for contrapuntal procedures of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, especially retrograde, augmentation, inversion, and mirroring. The modal character of the mediaeval melodies supports another, though not as prevalent, Milhaud trait: modal harmony. Harmonic idioms from the twentieth century are combined with this to create tone clusters, polychords, and polytonality. Texturally, the Neuf préludes are mostly rather spare and linear. Textures range from three independent lines to four/five-voiced parallel moving, organum-like chordal sections. Material in the manual clavier parts accompanying the ancient melodies varies from descant/countermelodies and filigree-like patterns to two-to-three voice block sonorities. Though definitely 'of the same cloth,' the nine preludes are each different enough to pleasurably be heard as a set. Along with the Pastorale, the Neuf préludes have consistently been the most performed and enjoyed of Milhaud's organ compositions."
O Domina Nostra or
O Domina Nostra
