Hypnos, God of Sleep... Simon-Pierre Bestion’s recordings are often inspired by his desire to recreate a ritual. His aim here was to recreate a Requiem service, ‘the ceremony that accompanies the passage of a human being into the hereafter, while supporting the feelings of all who witness it. Making use of all the freedom that this act of re-creation afforded me, I constructed this programme without boundaries between repertories or different musical aesthetics – from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the twentieth century – selecting the works for their captivating musical material, their hypnotic and meditative dimension’.

Intonations from Byzantine chant sit alongside guttural voices in Giacinto Scelsi and the English vocal style of John Tavener; Franco-Flemish Renaissance polyphony encounters the influences of eastern or western spiritual traditions present in the contemporary works.