Officium (album)

Officium is an album by Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and British male vocal quartet Hilliard Ensemble recorded at the monastery of Propstei St. Gerold in Austria in September 1993 and released on ECM the following year.

Background
Brought together by producer Manfred Eicher, this collaboration—based on 12th- to 16th-century liturgical works by composers including Cristóbal de Morales and Perotinus Magnus —has become one of the most successful releases on the ECM label, achieving sales of more than 1.5 million. Following a number of successful concert tours, a second collaborative album, Mnemosyne, was released in 1999 followed by Officium Novum (2010) and Remember me, my dear (2019).

Reception
AllMusic awards the album with 3½ stars and Richard S. Ginell's review says: "Recorded in a heavily reverberant Austrian monastery, the voices sometimes develop in overwhelming waves, and Garbarek rides their crest, his soprano saxophone 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."

Marius Gabriel remarked that Officium is "what Coltrane hears in heaven".

Track listing

 * 1) "Parce mihi domine" (from the Officium Defunctorum by Cristóbal 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 Du Fay) – 4:14
 * 13) "Virgo flagellatur" (Anonymous) – 5:19
 * 14) "Oratio Ieremiae" (Anonymous) – 5:00
 * 15) "Parce mihi domine" (de Morales) – 6:52

Musicians

 * Jan Garbarek – soprano and tenor saxophones
 * Hilliard Ensemble
 * David James – countertenor
 * Rogers Covey-Crump – tenor
 * John Potter – tenor
 * Gordon Jones – baritone

Technical personnel

 * Peter Laenger - tonmeister