(SW1025)
A purely instrumental mass setting by the 25-year-old Christian Ridil is presented to us here.
This unusual interpretation of the regular Mass Ordinary for the chamber music instrumentation of violin and piano, i.e. for instruments that were actually frowned upon in the aforementioned Cecilian tradition, represents a kind of rebellion against the in many respects restrictive regulations of his predominantly Cecilian school years with the Regensburger Domspatzen.
Formally strict and always oriented to the declamatory ductus of the Gregorian cantus of the individual Mass parts, the composer's thoroughly effective and allusive rhythmic refinement and his typical compositional rhetoric of a sometimes excessive chipping of the meter into the smallest, quasi-atomic particles with simultaneous consistent preservation of the formal-structural stringency are already manifested here.
Martin Schmeck