Perhaps Windows from 1996 is the most typical pivot point of this CD. In the older pieces the big story does not always work out, Jan Rokus van Roosendael is so obsessed with stripes, squares and dots across the board. Yet you also hear in a work like Echo from 1994 that this composer was able to make very entertaining music even with such primary data. In Windows, however, the music becomes a
… timeless liturgy for distant cultures and corners of the world, comparable to Scelsi's orchestral works. Apparently the composer found his true self with this work: in the late religious choral works - Psalm 139 (1997), The Beatitudes (2000) - he drew almost innocently and freely from the great vocal traditions of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Early Baroque. Unfortunately, we will never know how Van Roosendael - he died in 2005 at the age of 44 - would have developed further. (HJ)more
