Missa Luba

The centrepiece of this edition is the the Missa Luba, a version of the Latin mass bewitchingly performed by Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin. It includes the beautiful Sanctus which was deployed by director Lindsay Anderson to magical effect in his extraordinary 1968 film, If...This edition presents the Missa Luba complete in a programme which also includes the delightful Christmas in the Congo album and a selection of both children's songs and songs from Luba folklore, (eight of which are released here in digital format for the first time); all performed joyfully by Father Guido Haazen's remarkable youth choir. Taking its cue from both Sanctus and If..., the remainder of this edition surveys the use of unusual and classical music in post-war cinema by progressive film makers; among them Welles, Bergman, Buñuel, Kubrick, Powell, Visconti; poets and mavericks for whom cinema transcended even art. Malcolm McDowell's choice of Sanctus for If... was inspired. The other-worldliness of the music seems the perfect metaphor for the fight for freedom that Lindsay Anderson suggested If... was mostly about. Among some other sublime and powerfully effective examples of where film and music have become inseparable are included in this set; Mahler's Fifth Symphony in Visconti's Death in Venice; Chopin and Bach establishing atmosphere for Ingmar Bergman in Cries and Whispers; Bach and Beethoven haunting Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock; Chopin for Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces; Bach again, played by Glenn Gould, in George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five; Paganini ("a wizard of a different sort of fiddle") for Orson Welles in F for Fake; and for Wim Wender' Fitzcarraldo, Enrico Caruso, recorded in 1907, singing from Puccini's La Bohème.