Claude Ballif

condition (record/cover): NM / NM Gatefold sleeve with booklet inside.  Claude Ballif occupies a strange position in French new music: respected, performed, recorded, yet somehow never achieving the fame of his contemporaries. Prière À La Sainte Vierge / Chapelet / Les Battements Du Coeur De Jésus / Prière Au Seigneur on Arion reveals him in explicitly sacred mode, a composer unafraid of devotional subject matter when the avant-garde generally preferred secular abstraction.

The titles announce Catholic piety without irony. Ballif's faith was genuine, his musical language uncompromised. These pieces prove that advanced harmonic thinking and religious conviction need not conflict. Olivier Messiaen had demonstrated this already, but where Messiaen built cathedrals, Ballif constructed chapels: intimate, intense, scaled for private devotion rather than public spectacle. The LP preserves a spiritual practice as much as a musical one.