Wolfgang Rihm: Et Lux | Album Review

Wolfgang Rihm is a composer prepared to delve into the musical past as and when he pleases.

He's also a composer who likes to have his cake and eat it. So his hour-long Et Lux (2009), an engagement with fragments of the text of the Roman requiem liturgy, is carried through like a musical exploration of memory-haunted, overlapping, virtual realities.

The combination of performers says it all: the eight singers of Paul Van Nevel’s Huelgas Ensemble are specialists in medieval and Renaissance music, the strings of the Minguet Quartett in new music.

And Rihm’s extended contemplation also carries them to destinations in between in ways that are intended to be – and are – both disturbing and comforting.

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