Rarely have I learned as much when preparing to write a review as I have learned because of this album. Not only is this the most beautiful recording I’ve heard in years, listening to and learning about it has been a fascinating experience.
It began when I watched the DVD of Werner Herzog’s 2004 film The White Diamond, which documents the obsessive quest of an English aeronautical engineer to design and build an airship to allow him to film in the canopy of the South American rain forest. The soundtrack featured spellbinding music that mixed polyphonic singing and droning cello, which blended to perfectly complement the otherworldly and serene images in the film. Several months later, I also rented and watched another Herzog film, the sci-fi fantasy The Wild Blue Yonder, which used some of the same type of music behind images gleaned from NASA film archives and scenes of scuba diving under the South Polar icecap. When the innovative German label Winter & Winter released a CD that combined music from these two films under the title Requiem For A Dying Planet (named for the first act of The Wild Blue Yonder), I was ecstatic.
Herzog carefully chooses music for his films, and makes it an integral part of each project. My first real exposure to this fact was from Richard Thompson’s sublime work on the Grizzly Man soundtrack, which was one of my favorite releases of 2005 — one of the most popular aspects of that project is the separate documentary In The Edges about the making of the soundtrack.
You can read an essay about the rather complex history behind the Requiem recording at the Winter & Winter website.
This recording brings together three very disparate elements into a synergistic whole. They are Ernst Reijseger’s cello, the choral singing of the Sardinian group Tenore e Cuncordu de Orosei and the soaring vocals of Senegalese singer Mola Sylla. Each is a singular expression of music from widely differing traditions; together, they’re indescribable. I encourage you in particular to read the Wikipedia entry on Sardinian choral singing.
So, what about this album? Well, as I said, it’s indescribable. Reijseger’s playing combines avant-garde and classical techniques, with plenty of double-stopped drones and just as many passages of soaring scales, and frequent plucking. The Tenore group sings folk hymns in solo and four-part harmonies, based largely on Latin liturgy: “Libera me, Domine,” “Kyrie,” and “Sanctus” are some of the titles. And the jazz singer Sylla has written lyrics in Wolof, the chief language of Senegal, on similar worshipful themes, which he delivers in his powerful multi-octave-range vocal style, sometimes mingling with the choir and sometimes taking turns.
The three pieces I named above are, to me, the most arresting and beautiful on this album. They’re based on Gregorian-style songs, delivered in full-throated singing that makes the hair on my neck stand up every time I hear it. But it’s all gorgeous, including the old recording of contralto Emmi Leisner singing Handel’s “Dank Sei dir Gott.”
In many places, the music mingles with sounds from the movie soundtracks: radio bleeps and not-quite-audible ground-to-space voice messages, and jungle rivers and wildlife. It’s not obtrusive, and mostly adds to the atmosphere of secular worship that runs through both the films and the music.
I’ll end this with a quotation from the Winter & Winter website, translated from German, which sums up the project succinctly: “Requiem For a Dying Planet is not the anticipated death song for the earth, this music is dedicated to this wonderful planet and the beauty of living which could be heavenly if religions would not exist.”
(Winter & Winter, 2006)
