Henryk Górecki, Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Gavin Bryars, Sarah Leonard, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent

The soprano Sarah Leonard and the organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent made this recording in the Hofkirche in Lucerne. Their programme of sacred and visionary music spans almost a century, from the Messe des pauvres by Erik Satie of 1895 to The Black River by Gavin Bryars of 1991. At its centre is O Domina Nostra by Henryk Górecki, a long meditation for voice and organ.

The sessions took place in June 1992, with Manfred Eicher producing for ECM and Peter Laenger as engineer. The booklet has an English essay by Wilfrid Mellers and a German one by Gerhard R. Koch. Leonard sings the two vocal works, while Bowers-Broadbent plays Satie and two short organ preludes by Darius Milhaud from 1942 alone.

Górecki subtitled O Domina Nostra "Meditations on Our Lady of Jasna Góra" and compiled the Latin text himself. He wrote it with the 600th anniversary of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa in mind, and dedicated it to the soprano Stefania Woytowicz. The booklet dates it 1982-1985/90. Over a low pedal D and slowly descending triads, the voice stays in its lowest range for much of the piece, before returning to the opening invocation at the close. The Black River was written for a concert Bowers-Broadbent gave at Leicester Cathedral in January 1991. Its text comes from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, where Professor Aronnax describes the creatures that follow the Nautilus along an ocean current called the Black River. A languid organ introduction opens onto a long, shifting vocal line, and only the organ recalls the opening at the end. Satie's mass, usually sung with unison voices, is heard here in its organ part alone, and Milhaud's two preludes are brief, rustic miniatures.

In the British magazine Cross Rhythms in December 1993, John Irvine preferred the Górecki and Bryars to the Satie and wrote that "just below the serene surface there is tension and conflict." Tyran Grillo, in Between Sound and Space in 2010, found that Bowers-Broadbent draws "from the organ a delicacy I have heard nowhere else."

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1495, released in April 1993.