Paul McCartney: Ecce Cor Meum.
Orchestration by John Fraser.
Gavin Greenaway conducting the Academy of St. Martin's in the Fields.
Kate Royal, soprano.
King's College Choir Boys, Cambridge.
Magdalen College Choir Boys, Oxford.
London Voices.

It's often in musical experiences over the years that we build the foundation of our memories, that repository of the familiar and comfortable, as well as the unsettling and inescapable. I can reach back to a performance of The Play of Daniel in New York as my first real exposure to early music, at age 11, and to an afternoon a few months later at the Met, where I saw my first opera (La Traviata, with Maralin Niska).

But I'd have to go further back than that to locate the day when I first heard Paul McCartney, and like the opera and the early music, he's never really left. In fact, when I started mulling over this entry, a particular McCartney tune from the '70s settled into my brain and is there at this writing, thank you very much. I'll skip the title and spare you the earworm.

But decades after The Ed Sullivan Show and even "Give Ireland Back to the Irish," McCartney's on a very different journey, as evidenced by his new classical work, Ecce Cor Meum, "Behold My Heart," a phrase which McCartney saw written at the base of a crucifix.

"Now wait a minute," you're thinking. "Isn't that the sort of talk that got John into trouble all those years ago, and all those albums burned?"

Simmer down there, even in these politically volatile times. What McCartney has composed is four-part secular oratorio. It's not without a spiritual component, but it is, first and foremost, a personal testament, self-revelation. The work was begun before the death of McCartney's first wife, Linda, and bears, the composer says, her spirit.

The story of the work's composition is rather endearing in other ways, from McCartney's reaching back to his schoolboy Latin to his discovery during an initial performance of the work that the lengthy sung passages were, in fact, wearing out the young treble soloist.

So is Ecce Cor Meum recognizably Paul McCartney? Well, aside from the presence of some Latin, yes. If you are expecting the simple-hearted Paul, he's still lurking in there somewhere, within lyrics about the transforming power of music, of love, of nature, of peace. With McCartney, it always goes back to love, to the heart.

But perhaps it's a damaged heart. Look to the Interlude (Lament), with its oboe solo and atmospheric voices, and its more reflective mood. Lovely, yes, but informed by grief.

As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, "For grief indeed is love and grief beside."