Incredibly, it's been almost 20 years since Gothic Voices, Christopher Page, and Emma Kirkby have graced the CCM pages. It feels like a good time for a revisit.

I have deeply ambivalent feelings for the music of Hildegard. On the one hand, I love the flow and sheer beauty of her writing, and her ability and aim to make at least some link between the meaning of her texts and the music underscoring it is laudable (and in direct contrast to a lot of plainchant). That said, because her music is, as Ian Bent noted, "made up of a comparatively small number of elemental melodic patterns, which recur constantly under different melodic and modal conditions and are the common property of her poetic output," it is, for me, like the finest of spices; to wit, a little goes a very long way, indeed. When I got this recording, I happened to have gotten another Hildegard recording at the same time. As beautiful as they both are, about halfway through the second one I was becoming a bit weary. The upshot: small doses, spread out, are, well...simply divine.