Eternal Rest gathers four meditative choral works, three of which were written as memorials for the dead. Frank Martin's 1926 Mass for double choir, magisterial in scope and intimate in tone, is the centerpiece of the recording. Martin's compositional voice is circumspect and self-effacing, giving the Mass an understated quality appropriate for the devotional purpose for which it was created. The simplicity of Martin's Renaissance-like polyphony and his admirable text setting allow the words to be heard and understood, and ...
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Eternal Rest gathers four meditative choral works, three of which were written as memorials for the dead. Frank Martin's 1926 Mass for double choir, magisterial in scope and intimate in tone, is the centerpiece of the recording. Martin's compositional voice is circumspect and self-effacing, giving the Mass an understated quality appropriate for the devotional purpose for which it was created. The simplicity of Martin's Renaissance-like polyphony and his admirable text setting allow the words to be heard and understood, and the colorful late romantic (and sometimes frankly modern) harmonies keep the music consistently engaging. The other large work, Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae (1997), by Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, is testimony to the remarkable quality of choral music that came out of Scandinavia in the late twentieth century. The extended work, written in memory of the victims lost in the sinking of an Estonian ferry in 1994, uses texts from the Psalms and a Latin news report of the...
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