Organum's recordings of various kinds of chant invariably leave me astounded by the musical—and spiritual—revelations they offer and frustrated by the lack of information they present to support their often radical performance solutions. Here the background detail is rather stronger, the performances being closely related to a still-extant popular performing tradition, and the revelations quite astonishing.
Over the last five years Peres has been working with a group of young Corsican folk singers anxious to preserve their cultural heritage, and he has taught them to read musical notation. Their experience and style are applied on this disc to music culled from four seventeenth-century liturgical manuscripts from the Franciscan Provincial Library in Bastia. Peres points out that there are no sources from earlier than this period, but in air view of the continuity of performance style on the island (though it disappeared from the churches with Vatican II) and the success with which the music lends itself to this treatment, this would seem to matter little.
The musical results are extraordinary. To a motley collection of styles (rococo here, simple unison melody there, genuinely folk-style harmonized chant elsewhere) these performers bring an intense conviction (it is their heritage—just listen to the way they reiterate the word ''Kyrie'' in the second movement of the Requiem) and a throaty, plangent sound which is moving in the extreme. Apart from the Kyrie, the Sanctus (track 4) is absolutely spine-chilling: it's in typical folk-style (of which a kind of heterophonic imitation is characteristic) with some very unexpected harmonic shifts and an utterly unpredictable tonal direction. The other end of the stylistic range is represented by the Agnus Dei, which is galant in style and sounds like a sketch for a duet with unrealized continuo, and the Veni Creator Spiritus which ends the disc is a splendid example of ornamented falsobordone. Strongly recommended.'