Arvo Part - Choral & Instrumental Works (2004) [2CD]
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Heard a track on Radio 3, so bought this as a 'taster' of Pärt's music. A superb introduction, and play it frequently! Born at Paide in Estonia in 1935, a pupil of Heino Eller at Tallinn Conservatory, sometime sound engineer at Estonian Radio, and first prize-winner at the All-Union Young Composers' Competition in Moscow in 1962, Arvo Part, who emigrated to the west with his family in 1980, is one of the leading figures in contemporary music. He had been working with twelve-tone composition and serialism, as well as collage and aleatory techniques, but after a long period of virtual silence when he made a deep and searching study of plainsong, French and Franco-Flemish music of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and the traditions of orthodox sacred music, he engaged in a major reassessment of his own style, emerging in 1976 to effect a renewal of his language.

Part's preferred style is an apparent minimalism, using repetitive, almost static, procedures, as exemplified notably in Fratres, but he uses above all what he himself has called tintinnabuli (from the Latin tintinnabulum, a little bell). "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. The one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements - with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials - with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulations." The result of long research, this technique explores a type of writing note on note, using the different positions and inversions of a single chord, without modulation or chromaticism. His works are numerous: Magnificat, Magnificat antiphons and Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten - a piece with a dark, refined lyricism -are all inhabited by the sound of bells.

Arvo Part has attached great importance to sacred music, though not necessarily intended for performance in a holy place. During his early years spent behind the iron curtain, the religious connotations of many of his works earned him the attentions of the censor: he was, for example, forced to change the title of Summa, a work of an obsessive nature written in 1977 on the Latin text of the Credo.

It has often been said that Arvo Part's music, apparently simple and of a luminous serenity, came out of silence and progressively returned to it, and in this respect Tabula rasa represents a striking example of his use of silence. "It is through this search for interior silence and the deepest spirituality that Arvo. Part's music leads the listener ineluctably on"


01 - Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1997) 6:19
02 - Summa (1978) 5:31
03 - The Beatitudes (1990, rev. 1991) 6:06
04 - Fratres (version VI) (1991) 10:14
05 - Festina Lente 6:13
06 - Magnificat (1989) 6:30
07 - Silentium (from Tabula Rasa) 16:22

Guy Johnson treble - Tasmin Little, Richard Studt violin - Martin Roscoe piano
Choir of King's College, Cambridge / Stephen Cleobury
Bournemouth Sinfonietta / Richard Studt - London Philarmonic / Franz Welser-Most


CD2:

01 - Statuit ei Dominus 5:06
02 - Missa syllabica - Kyrie 2:38
03 - Missa syllabica - Gloria 2:21
04 - Missa syllabica - Credo 6:43
05 - Missa syllabica - Sanctus 1:26
06 - Missa syllabica - Agnus Dei 2:22
07 - Missa syllabica - Ite, missa est 0:37
08 - Beatus Petronius 5:05
09 - Magnificat-Antiphonen (1) 1:46
10 - Magnificat-Antiphonen (2) 2:37
11 - Magnificat-Antiphonen (3) 1:10
12 - Magnificat-Antiphonen (4) 1:54
13 - Magnificat-Antiphonen (5) 1:42
14 - Magnificat-Antiphonen (6) 2:07
15 - Magnificat-Antiphonen (7) 2:13
16 - De profundis 5:35
17 - Memento 8:50
18 - Cantate Domino 2:42
19 - Solfeggio 4:05

Estonian Philarmonic Chamber Choir / Tonu Kaljuste


*2004 EMI Records / Virgin Classics | 7243 5 62434 2 2



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