Björk
Prayer Of The Heart

THE REVIEW

"Prayer Of The Heart" is a fifteen-minute composition, created on February 2, 2004 as a tribute to the artist and composer John Tavener and performed by a magnetic Bjork, accompanied by the inseparable Brodsky Quartet, which weaves an intangible and aquatic continuous layering of strings for her.

Well. And now that I have finished the informative part of the review, let me travel.

Devastating piece. Among the most unforgettable I have ever listened to.  
A tormented poem, unbearably painful and of a disorienting beauty, which keeps drawing ellipses of smoke in the air, leaning beyond the barricade of the audibly pleasant, to plunge into the darkest and most disorienting oblivion, dragging beauty and remorse behind in a sorrowful ride of sighs. You feel shattered, like a vindictive mirror that hands you seven years of bad luck. You suddenly feel the distorted world surrounding you. You feel the dusk struggling to descend because of the fear of killing the afternoon. You feel the black night, which scares the sleeping children. 

Fifteen minutes you wish would never end, that dive into the splendid sound waters and then emerge to suffocate and drag you to the shore, while the strings, enveloping, tower over you like the sky, the sea, the night.  And if you concentrate, you see them. They're there, dancing invisibly in front of you. Making themselves tangible, blowing on your neck. Like life. Like death. And Bjork! Damn, Bjork! Her voice is the siren everyone would love to be enchanted by. You hear her perfectly blend with the strings, yelling at you, whispering to you, suffering and dancing, forcing you to say in a soft and whispered voice: "This is love." 

Yes.

This is one of those pieces that, listened to with closed eyes, makes you whisper with a rose in hand: "Damn, I have a soul too".

Kyrie Eleison.