Requiem contains:
01. Prélude 5'33
02. Kyrie 3'52
03. Dies Irae 7'57
04. Urupfu 16'50
05. Sanctus 7'17
06. Agnus Dei 5'57
07. Epilogue 11'30

♫ 01. Prélude
© Cypres Records CYP1655


♫ 02. Kyrie
© Cypres Records CYP1655


♫ 03. Dies Irae
© Cypres Records CYP1655


♫ 04. Urupfu
© Cypres Records CYP1655


♫ 05. Sanctus
© Cypres Records CYP1655


♫ 06. Agnus Dei
© Cypres Records CYP1655


♫ 07. Epilogue
© Cypres Records CYP1655

Unlike many liturgical works, Pierre Bartholomée’s Requiem – probably one of the first of the twenty-first century – does not draw on Holy Scripture but on a human tragedy, that of little Jessica, a Rwandan child, the survivor of the genocide that slaughtered nearly 800,000 of her contemporaries, who yet was to find death – a death as tragic as it was absurd – in her country of asylum, the United States of America. However, this Requiem, which is both polyglot and ecumenical, does not content itself with building walls about fragments from Jessica’s correspondence; Pierre Bartholomée surrounds himself with religious texts (from which the name de God is absent) and with a phrase from the Belgian poet Henri Bauchau, the librettist of his two operas. Pierre Bartholomée, whose discography with Cypres has been widely hailed by the international press (two “Chocs” from Le Monde de la Musique) has produced a work of poignancy, of substance, one that is less scrupulously intellectual than is his custom, and one that finds its place within the fine tradition of this subjective history of the requiem that it brings to a close.