Soeur Marie Keyrouz belongs to a rare breed of musicians: a fully trained female cantor of talent, she has already achieved international fame through her recordings of oriental Christian chants, in particular those of her own branch of Christianity, the Maronite Church. In this new recording she reveals herself as a composer and a mystic poet as well as a brilliant performer. The seven sacred songs include the Magnificat and a psalm (Like as the hart): the five others are original poems on major Christian themes. Soeur Marie’s special contributions are her musical settings of the Magnificat and of the last text, which deals with the soul’s progress from darkness to light; and also her poem La berceuse des saints, a lullaby for the infant Jesus, which contains a depth of meaning well beyond the run-of-the-mill Christmas carol. The musical style of all the songs is modelled on that of the traditional liturgy: it exists within the framework of an established modality and exploits such favoured oriental delights as the augmented second.
As regards performance, we have here yet another example of this chantress’s imaginative excellence and control, combined with her usual quite extraordinary fluency. Highly recommended.'