Stephen Hartke, The Hilliard Ensemble

This was the first album on ECM New Series devoted entirely to the American composer Stephen Hartke, born in 1952. His music had entered the label through Michelle Makarski's solo recital Caoine in 1995. It pairs two vocal works written for The Hilliard Ensemble. Tituli sets the oldest surviving Latin inscriptions, and Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain a poem by the Japanese poet and sculptor Takamura Kotaro. Both draw on chant and medieval organum, heard through a modern ear.

The idea for Tituli came to Hartke in 1993, while he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He was not commissioned: he approached the Hilliard Ensemble through Makarski, and the group gave the premiere in 1999. The quartet then asked him for a piece for its four regular voices alone, which became Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain (2000). The recording was made in February 2003 at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, with Donald Crockett conducting. Countertenor David James and his colleagues are joined by a fifth voice, tenor Andreas Hirtreiter, while Makarski and two percussionists play in Tituli. Hartke produced the session himself.

Tituli runs for 42 minutes in seven movements. Lapis niger is built on an inscription so damaged that only odd words survive. Columna rostrata recounts a Roman naval triumph over nervous percussion and violin, while Elogio parvuli, the longest section, is an epitaph for a boy who died at six. Other movements set a bilingual shop sign, oracle texts and words scratched on everyday objects, some in Etruscan. Cathedral in the Thrashing Rain lasts eighteen minutes. It follows the poet's first sight of Notre-Dame in a storm. The text is sung in Hiroaki Sato's English translation, with occasional lines of Japanese.

Critics in Britain took to the disc. In BBC Music Magazine, Anthony Burton found Tituli "strangely timeless". He added that "impeccable performances, recording and presentation enhance the effect of this fascinating disc." Robert Hugill, on MusicWeb International in 2005, recommended it highly and praised its "distinctive atmosphere that owes much to the aura of the words Hartke is setting." The booklet includes an essay by the playwright and poet Philip Littell.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1861, first released in 2005.