Missa Mundi (V. Prayer)

Luca Massaglia (http://www.lucamassaglia.com/) plays "Prayer" (no. 5 from "Missa Mundi") by Charles Camilleri (1931-2009).

Charles Camilleri was a Maltese composer, long acknowledged as Malta's national composer.
The title of "Missa Mundi" alludes to "The Mass of the World" which Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), French philosopher and Jesuit priest, wrote on the feast of Transfiguration, in 1923, in the Ordos desert, as a substitute for the Mass which he could not celebrate for the lack of bread and wine. But "Missa Mundi" is not a musical illustration of Teilhard's text. It is rather a re-creation in sound of his vision of the "divine radiating from the depths of matter ablaze".
Camilleri succeeds in fulfilling Teilhard's aspiration to express the universal longing for the convergence of the cosmos on a divine centre even more thoroughly than Teilhard himself could in the medium of language, which suffers from the inevitable limitations of being particular and untranslatable.
In "Prayer", the last section of "Missa Mundi", all apocalyptic overtones are excluded. There is a total absence of conflict and a climate of total trust. This is achieved by the use of the simplest musical means possible. There is no modulation, but total purity and peace in the long-held notes. A sense of timelessness, or rather of "the intersection of the timeless with time" is kindled, "all passion spent". All becoming appears to be slowly absorbed by absolute being, but our beloved mother earth subsists still, like iron which has been strenghtened by the flames and imbued with the capacity of lasting forever.