Streaming - a fond farewell from the Hilliards and Jan Garbarek

The Guardian 0

A live album captures the bestselling collaboration on their final tour. Plus, another superb recording from St John’s, Cambridge

• Who would have guessed that a British male-voice quartet and a Norwegian saxophonist would form a lasting union. It’s now 25 years since the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek joined forces at the suggestion of ECM’s founder-impresario, Manfred Eicher, to release Officium, one of the cult label’s bestsellers. Garbarek and the Hilliards gave their farewell concerts together in 2014. Remember me, my dear (ECM) is the fruit of that last tour.

The wide-ranging programme follows their established recipe of early, contemporary and improvised music, recorded to achieve heightened resonance, embellished with Garbarek’s poetic soprano sax, at times jaunty, at others possessing the imperative cry of a shofar. The ebullient rhythms of Pérotin’s Alleluia Nativitas, and its segue into Hildegard of Bingen’s O ignis Spiritus, then Garbarek’s We are the Stars makes a typically compelling sequence. The title song – anonymous Scottish 16th century – is a heartfelt finale. Not for purists, but offering its own singular and hard-won purity.