Contaminazioni Contemporanee: Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea 2006 – 2009

The Contaminazioni Contemporanee, or Contemporary Contaminations, series emerged in Bergamo, Italy, as a multi-year festival devoted to ECM Records’ eclectic sound world. Its title treats contamination as a creative principle: one tradition entering another and subtly rearranging its inner architecture. Its scope embraces sacred music alongside Mediterranean traditions, with Eastern and Western vocabularies meeting throughout. It is also a rare New Series-dominant ECM sampler. Appropriately, it opens with Arvo Pärt, whose music inaugurated that very imprint. Da pacem Domine, heard as it first appeared on Lamentate (ECM New Series 1930), was composed in 2004 from a ninth-century Gregorian antiphon and recorded the following year at St. Gerold monastery near the Austrian Alps. The Hilliard Ensemble and soprano Sarah Leonard deliver a performance of extraordinary inwardness. Pärt’s apparent simplicity demands absolute discipline, since every sustained tone contains microscopic tension.…