CLASSICAL20.COM

Sacred music is by no means at the centre of his creative output, and Wolfgang Rihm had actually intended to »take off his monastic habit«, as he himself recalls, when he completed the Deus Passus, his Passion works according to St. Luke which premiered in 2000. Yet things turned out very differently. Increasingly fascinated by a suggestion to compose several A cappella works for the Passion Week, he committed the Sieben Passions-Texte – Latin motets in the spirit of the past and in the knowledge of their irretrievability – to paper over the course of the following years. »Sing it as if it were old music«, Rihm had advised his commissioners from Singer Pur, »then it will be clear that this isn’t what it is at all«. Never before had the thin-skinned sound dreamer woven such a secretive tapestry of voices, ambiguous, phantasmagoric, forgotten between the eras, vulnerable and wounded at the same time. Music that makes one shudder. [Source]