Officium (album)

The artists had been brought together by the producer Manfred Eicher. Their musical collaboration is based on 12th- to 16th-century liturgical works by composers including Cristóbal de Morales and Perotinus Magnus.^[2] It became one of the most successful releases on the ECM label, achieving sales of more than 1.5 million.^[3] Following a number of successful concert tours, a series of collaborative albums was released: Mnemosyne (1999), Officium Novum (2010) and Remember me, my dear (2019).^[4]

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Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[5]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings	[6]

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AllMusic awards the album with 3½ stars and Richard S. Ginell's review says: "Recorded in a heavily reverberant Austrian monastery, the voices sometimes develop in overwhelming waves, and Garbarek rides their crest, his soprano saxophone soaring in the monastery acoustic, or he underscores the voices almost unobtrusively, echoing the voices, finding ample room to move around the modal harmonies yet applying his sound sparingly."^[5]

Marius Gabriel remarked that Officium is "what Coltrane hears in heaven".^[7]

1. "Parce mihi domine" (from the Officium Defunctorum by Cristóbal de Morales) – 6:42
2. "Primo tempore" (Anonymous) – 8:03
3. "Sanctus" (Anonymous) – 4:44
4. "Regnantem Sempiterna" (Anonymous) – 5:36
5. "O Salutaris Hostia" (Pierre de la Rue) – 4:34
6. "Procedentem sponsum" (Anonymous) – 2:50
7. "Pulcherrima rosa" (Anonymous) – 6:55
8. "Parce mihi domine" (de Morales) – 5:35
9. "Beata viscera" (Magister Perotinus) – 6:34
10. "De spineto nata rosa" (Anonymous) – 2:30
11. "Credo" (Anonymous) – 2:06
12. "Ave maris stella" (Guillaume Du Fay) – 4:14
13. "Virgo flagellatur" (Anonymous) – 5:19
14. "Oratio Ieremiae" (Anonymous) – 5:00
15. "Parce mihi domine" (de Morales) – 6:52