Officium NovumECM ****

The third recording by Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble takes its mainly sacred, early music focus mostly from the Caucasus, where the cultural/religious tectonics of Europe and Asia have produced their own musical landscape. Central to it is 19th-century priest-musicologist Komitas Vardapet's serene settings of Armenian liturgy, Ov zarmanali, Surb, surband the superb Hays hark nviranats ukhti. All are rooted, like the other Orthodox variants here ( Otche nashand Svjete tihj), in the past. Yet the inclusion of modern pieces, such as Arvo Pärt's Most Holy Mother of Godand Garbarek's own beautifully voiced Allting finnsand We Are the Stars, sits easily with their company - proof, again, of the essential unity of the eclectic perspectives shared by the improvising jazz saxophonist and classical vocal ensemble. They bring the music's superbly recorded, austere beauty movingly to life.

See classical.ie