Evensong
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley March 19, 2024
Artist – Kevin Keller
Distributor:
Released: July 2023
Running Time: 39 mins 24 secs
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Composer and musician Kevin Keller has in Evensong created a most relaxing and deeply tonal series of compositions to enchant and rejuvenate based on the ancient music of Hildegard of Bingen, an Abbess who lived more than 800 years ago. She was a visionary, prophet, writer and composer, writing songs for her Nuns to sing at their devotions.
She left a legacy of compositions that lay largely unheralded until the late 1970’s when her music found a receptive audience with young professionals looking for solace and relaxation through music.
Evensong sees Kevin Keller utilising the medium of electronic music in harmony with traditional instruments to create a modern format of simply divine music. Call it spacey, otherworldly or simply divine, it touches the very heart with grace and beauty, the modern equivalent to an ancient form of relaxation and thanksgiving.
The framework of this intriguing album contains three tracks featuring the divinely beautify voices of Katherine Wessinger, track 3, Danya Katok, track 4 and Laura Metcalf, track 7, each one adding an angelic overlay to the modern, electronic compositions which gentles the occasional, almost demanding elements of discord within the structure.
Reading the notes accompanying the album, Keller has used the concept of canonical hours relating them to cycle of birth to death. From the ethereal Evensong 1, the birth of the album, to the finale of a robust and yet delicate Evensong 8, concluding the cycle, the work is such that it could be considered as complex simplicity which upon reflection, relates to the natural rhythm and heartbeat of life.
The beautifully sung Latin on several of the songs is that penned by Hildegard of Bingen more than 800 years ago.