This website has one or two contacts that you might not have expected, one of which is Fr. Aelred, a monk in Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland, who was kind enough to send a copy of this new disc from that Benedictine monastery.
A few decades ago, Gregorian Chant made up a large part of what many of us knew of 'Early Music'and then it was adopted by the New Age people as a meditative accompaniment to the miscellany of fads and baloney that they accumulated into a lifestyle.
The increased availability of a wider range of medieval music and earlier, plus the retreat of New Age fashion into less visible enclaves, has allowed chant to resume its proper role in monastic life.
The notes on this disc tell us that on Easter Day,
death was swallowed up by life; the reign of Satan was broken...heaven was thrown open , and sadness and sorrow gave way to unending joy.
Would that it were, except to say that bereft feelings of 'sadness and sorrow' are generally more productive of great art and there are those among us who might honestly yet begin to tire of 'unending joy' after a while.
I'm bound to say, as a very inexpert admirer of chant, that it is one of those forms of music in which one piece sounds very much like the others to the less well informed. All the work of recording and editing was done here by monks at Pluscarden, my friend not being among those with a voice of sufficient quality to perform. It captures a warm and intimate sound, soft and atmospheric in the requisite way. For all that the text would have been given a more varied and dramatic setting by Bach or James MacMillan, it is given disciplined and concentrated expression here, not in monotone or to soporific effect but with metrical variation and organ in places, including a short solo by Pachelbel.
It was a nice package to come home to, not something one expects or often gets. It will sit nicely alongside my other Pluscarden disc, the Liturgy for St. Columba.
http://www.pluscardenabbey.org/home.asp
