Hyperion Records

With its typically homogeneous, flowing organ accompaniment and intermittent homophonic choral lines, this setting has the feel of a stretched out Anglican hymn; not inappropriately so, as it sets words from a sermon preached on 19 February 1843 by one of the nineteenth century’s most influential Anglican poet-priests, John Henry Newman. Pärt is not familiar with Newman’s greatest musical memorial, Elgar’s setting of The Dream of Gerontius; but he is acquainted with the Vicar of the Church of St Mary the Virgin and St Nicholas, Littlemore (near Oxford), where Newman lived and worked from 1840 to 1846. And it was Reverend Bernhard Schünemann who asked him to write this Littlemore Tractus, to commemorate the anniversary of Newman’s birth on 21 February 2001.

from notes by Meurig Bowen © 2003