Officium (album)

Reception

Allmusic awarded the album with 3½ stars and its review by Richard S. Ginell states: "Recorded in a heavily reverberant Austrian monastery, the voices sometimes develop in overwhelming waves, and Garbarek rides their crest, his soprano saxophone soaring in the monastery acoustic, or he underscores the voices almost unobtrusively, echoing the voices, finding ample room to move around the modal harmonies yet applying his sound sparingly." Marius Gabriel remarked that Officium is "what Coltrane hears in heaven."

Brought together by Manfred Eicher, this collaboration has become one of the most successful releases on the ECM label, achieving sales of more than 1.5 million. Following a number of successful concert tours, a second collaborative album, Mnemosyne, was released in 1999. Officium Novum, another sequel album, was released in September 2010.

Track listing

1. "Parce mihi domine" (Christóbal de Morales) – 6:42
2. "Primo tempore" (Anonymous) – 8:03
3. "Sanctus" (Anonymous) – 4:44
4. "Regnanten Sempiterna" (Anonymous) – 5:36
5. "O Salutaris Hostia" (Pierre de la Rue) – 4:34
6. "Procedentem sponsum" (Anonymous) – 2:50
7. "Pulcherrima rosa" (Anonymous) – 6:55
8. "Parce mihi domine" (de Morales) – 5:35
9. "Beata viscera" (Magister Perotinus) – 6:34
10. "De spineto nata rosa" (Anonymous) – 2:30
11. "Credo" (Anonymous) – 2:06
12. "Ave maris stella" (Guillaume Dufay) – 4:14
13. "Virgo flagellatur" (Anonymous) – 5:19
14. "Oratio Ieremiae" (Anonymous) – 5:00
15. "Parce mihi domine" (de Morales) – 6:52

Personnel