CD: MIDORI - Gregorian Devotion

By John Healey View Profile
Gregorian Devotion by Midori, and for that read Llewellyn, is a CD with an interesting history. The retailer Marks & Spencer has put this recording out twice already, calling it Sancturary, (I quite like this one,) and then releasing it as Gregorian Chants. Both versions have slightly different arrangements of quasi baroque music. This is the original, with natural sounds - mainly birdsong. You'd be forgiven, pardon the pun, for thinking it will mostly appeal to some one with a devotional side to their nature. Anyone, that is, who isn't worried about splashing cold water on their face and who feels a monastery or cloistered abbey is really going to do it for them. M & S must have wondered about this. That's probably the reason the music was added. And why they went for brighter sleeve artwork, because the sombre cover here gives - and this is the point I'm coming to - little indication of just how joyful the singing actually sounds. The content, you see, is so not some kind of monks karaoke night. Best used to evoke a sense of time and place in a listener trying to become still, Gregorian Devotion will work for visualisation exercises: I've given a copy to a woman who attended my awareness class who believed she couldn't meditate.

By Michelle, Tyne & Wear
My sister-in-law in Oxford bought this for me as an early Christmas Present, she knows I love historic places, like castles and old churches and buildings of architectural beauty like Gothic period which is what the cover of the CD reminds me of, and the music reminds me of when I was in Greece with my children in 2002. It's like the Byzantine music over there, relaxing and does take you back in time with a little imagination. I am only in my early forties but I like this to relax to. Though I cannot get away much with the ones that contain birdsong the rest of the album is enchanting.