(Hit the back button on your browser to return to product listing.) Yoga Journal "Gentile's artful renditions of these 12th century pieces are impressive, but this album is essentially about devotional ecstasy. The soprano's glorious voice celebrates Hildegard's union with the divine...the sense of intimacy, trust, and abandonment in God..." Cosmic Debris / Classical Net "... a mesmerizing loveliness, a loveliness that heightens the effectiveness of those moments of seemingly intense spiritual ecstasy... one is astonished by the rightness of her phrasing throughout the disc, by the subtlety in how she swells her voice to fullness and softens it to delicate, velvety pianissimos, and, most importantly, by how she so consistently captures Hildegard's simple yet elusive and vocally challenging idiom. There are many Hildegard discs on the market today, but this Lyrichord offering surely ranks among the best. It features splendid sound, excellent notes, beautiful singing, and the music of the intriguing, the remarkable Hildegard of Bingen." - Robert Cummings Gramophone (London, England) "The range of recent Hildegard recordings is impressive and a testimony to the current standards in this kind of music...But there were three recordings that gave me unexpected pleasure, all for entirely different reasons...[including] that of the American singer Norma Gentile. The main virtue of this recording is that she approaches the music like the concert recitalist tackling Schubert, asking questions...and for each piece she offers a different answer. We need more singers with that attitude in this repertory." -David Fallows Early Music America Magazine "Like Gentile's previous recording, it shimmers..." -Mark Longaker American Record Guide "... a genuinely valuable contribution to the discography of Abbess Hildegard (1098-1179). She [Gentile] has a fine, rich-toned, splendidly controlled voice; and she realizes the shape of the melodies, in relation to the words, with great sensitivity, capturing the uniquely hypnotic, rhapsodic quality of Hildegard's mystical outpourings." -John W. Barker Critics' Choice/College Press Service Gentile's dark, rich voice -- augmented occasionally by a drone choir -- is a wonderful vehicle for these pieces, and she sings with a commitment that reveals musical depths often hidden in some of the more academic recordings available on the market... Highly recommended. -Rick Anderson |