Muzycy: David James : counter-tenor
John Potter : tenor
Rogers Covey-Crump : tenor
Gordon Jones : baritone

Info wydawcy:

"In Paradisum" combines music from three sources: the Officium Defunctorum of Victoria, polyphony by Palestrina and Gregorian chant from a 17th century manuscript. Placing the work of the Spanish and Italian religious composers in a historically "authentic" context, the Hilliard Ensemble also give us a sense of the overwhelming musical experience that the Catholic Mass was at the time of the Renaissance.


After their enormous successes with Officium and Mnemosyne, the Hilliard Ensemble return to important source material including the Officium defunctorum of Victoria, and polyphony of Palestrina, as well as Gregorian chant from the Toul Graduale of 1610.

The music of Tomás Luis de Victoria and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina has been a cornerstone of the Hilliard Ensemble’s repertoire almost from the beginning of the group’s long history. In recent seasons they have frequently performed a programme they call “In Paradisum”, which incorporates motets by Victoria and Palestrina, framed by a roughly contemporary plainsong Requiem Mass. The antiphon “In Paradisum deducant te angeli” – may the angels conduct you to Paradise – gives the album its title, this being the sequence which concludes the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic liturgy for the dead, before the funeral procession leaves the church to escort the body to its final resting place.

Composer Ivan Moody, contributing to “In Paradisum” as an essayist, points out that while our awareness of the musical achievement of the great composers of liturgical polyphony has grown in this century, we have also lost our perspective of the fact that they were first and foremost men of the spirit (Palestrina’s social connections and more worldly ambitions notwithstanding) whose greatest works were written for the glory of God. Here, the Hilliard singers restore a.......
more