I'll bet it wasn't Austria - my first thought was India, or womewhere associated with the rising sun, the Levant, the Orient. And yet 
it is Austria: Stift Heiligenkreuz to be precise, one of the oldest Cistertian monasteries (founded in 1133) and a pleasant day trip from Vienna. (They've posted a video on youtube, including of course the visit of Pope Benedict!) It's suddenly come to world attention because of this album (subtitled "Music for Paradise" on their website), which it is hoped will be the kind of "crossover hit" which the monks of San Domingo de Silos had with their "Chant," 
recorded in 1973 but rereleased as "Chant" in 1994; it sold 3 million copies in the US alone. Do they know what those 3 million people did with their recording of Gregorian chants? Candlelit it may well have been, but meditation or prayer it probably was not.Stranger still is the music they've chosen to include - all recorded in such a way that you feel you are among the monks, not sitting in a Romanesque church with the monks in choirstalls some distance away. It includes familiars dear to all of us who enjoy the Offices (like the office of Compline). But they start with the funeral service for a monk, In Paradisum and Requiem. Weird. Lots of differing crossings-over going on here, perhaps too many.
