Officium (album)

Officium is an album by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and early music vocal group, The Hilliard Ensemble, that was released in 1994.

Brought together by Manfred Eicher, this collaboration has become one of the most successful releases on the ECM label, achieving sales of more than 1.5 million.^[2] The Allmusic review by Richard S. Ginell awards the album 3.5 stars and states "Recorded in a heavily reverberant Austrian monastery, the voices sometimes develop in overwhelming waves, and Garbarek rides their crest, his soprano sax soaring in the monastery acoustic, or he underscores the voices almost unobtrusively, echoing the voices, finding ample room to move around the modal harmonies yet applying his sound sparingly."^[1]

Following a number of successful concert tours, a second collaborative album, Mnemosyne, was released in 1999. Officium Novum, another sequel album, was released in September 2010.^[3]

Track listing

1. "Parce mihi domine" (Christóbal de Morales) - 6:42
2. "Primo tempore" (Anonymous) - 8:03
3. "Sanctus" (Anonymous) - 4:44
4. "Regnanten Sempiterna" (Anonymous) - 5:36
5. "O Salutaris Hostia" (Pierre de La Rue) - 4:34
6. "Procedentem sponsum" (Anonymous) - 2:50
7. "Pulcherrima rosa" (Anonymous) - 6:55
8. "Parce mihi domine" (de Morales) - 5:35
9. "Beata viscera" (Magister Perotinus) - 6:34
10. "De spineto nata rosa" (Anonymous) - 2:30
11. "Credo" (Anonymous) - 2:06
12. "Ave maris stella" (Guillaume Dufay) - 4:14
13. "Virgo flagellatur" (Anonymous) - 5:19
14. "Oratio Ieremiae" (Anonymous) - 5:00
15. "Parce mihi domine" (de Morales) - 6:52

• Recorded September 1993 at Propstei St. Gerold
• Tonmeister: Peter Laenger

Personnel

• The Hilliard Ensemble
  • David James - countertenor
  • Rogers Covey-Crump - tenor
  • John Potter - tenor
  • Gordon Jones - baritone

• Jan Garbarek - soprano and tenor saxophones

References