Media Vita

Out of simple, Pärt-like musical material Kevin Siegfried builds an antiphon of austere beauty. Media Vita takes its text from the Latin proper for the last weeks of Lent, words that seriously disturb the comfortable distance we put between ourselves and our own mortality. The music has something of the timeless impersonality of Byzantine chant but also the pressure and presence of personal conviction. High A's and B's for sopranos evince a strain which, here, is not mannered, still less ill-judged, but contributes expressively to that pressure.

— Peter Dale, Choir & Organ, July/August 2003