Marina Rebeka / Sinfonietta Rīga / Latvian Radio Choir / Modestas Pitrėnas CREDO

 

CREDO

 

Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards Kļava BRUCKNER Latin Motets

 

LATIN MOTETS

 

Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards Klava KOMITAS Divine Liturgy

DIVINE LITURGY

Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards Kļava TCHAIKOVSKY Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom - Nine Sacred Choruses

LITURGY OF ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

Latvian Radio Choir / Sinfonietta Rīga / Sigvards Kļava PETERIS VASKS Laudate Dominum

LAUDATE DOMINUM

Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards Kļava GEORGY SVIRIDOV Canticles and Prayers

CANTICLES AND PRAYERS

Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards KlavanTCHAIKOVSKY All-Night Vigil

ALL-NIGHT VIGIL

Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards Kļava BERNAT VIVANCOS Requiem

REQUIEM

Latvian Radio Choir / Sigvards Kļava ANDREJS SELICKIS Paradisus vocis

Andrejs Selickis (b. 1960) is a singular, idiosyncratic phenomenon among Latvian composers. As with Arvo Pärt, Selickis’ work is inseparably linked to his faith, which has found a deep and unique expression in his distinct style. Iconic symbolism, sacred archetypes and the ecstatic experience of God’s presence are the keys to his music. This new recording by the Latvian Radio Choir includes choral works by Selickis. Andrejs Selickis grew up and studied music in Latvia, when a crucial meeting with Arvo Pärt took place in the 1970s. Arvo Pärt became a mentor and an example for the composer, both in life and in music. After Pärt emigrated from the Soviet Union, Selickis’ found new home in his church. Selickis has worked as an independent artist since graduating from the conservatory. He lives in Riga and serves as a regent, liturgist and psalmist in various congregations of the Church. In 2015 he was awarded the Latvian Great Music Award, the highest state honor in music. The creative collaboration and friendship between Sigvards Klava and Selickis began in 2012 with the Litany to Mother Teresa, the first composition with which Andrejs Selickis entered active concert life. Together, Klava and Selickis have studied and sung Old Believer chants and have also set out pilgrimages to various monasteries. The present album serves as a resume of the creative collaboration between the Latvian Radio Choir, Sigvards Klava and Andrejs Selickis.

ARVO PÄRT MUSICA SELECTA A Sequence by Manfred Eicher

Of all the longstanding relationships built between its artists and Manfred Eicher, the musical partnership of ECM Records' founder/primary producer and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt—who turned 80 years old on September 11, 2015—has to be one of the label's most important and fruitful. Certainly, amidst ECM's more composition-focused New Series imprint, there are few others whose collaborations with Eicher have proven to be so personally meaningful, so groundbreaking and so emotionally resonant. While Eicher worked in the classical world prior to launching the label's New Series imprint with Pärt's Tabula Rasa in 1984—specifically, beyond being double bassist in a symphony orchestra before starting the label in 1969, his work with early minimalist trendsetter Steve Reich, whose Music for 18 Musicians (1978), Octet; Music for Large Ensemble; Violin Phase (1980) and Tehillim (1982) would later be reissued on CD within the New Series sphere—it was Pärt's early, innovative work that both captured Eicher's ear and drove him to reach out to the composer, beginning a musical partnership that has yielded a baker's dozen of exceptional recordings under the composer's name over the past three decades, and a further two that bring Pärt compositions together with the likes of Philip Glass, Peter Maxwell Davies, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Werner Bärtschi and others whose music spans three centuries and only serves to demonstrate the sheer timelessness of Pärt's work. 

There are others who have released recordings of Pärt's music, but none have benefitted from the composer's collaboration with a producer who stands out as a rare entity, actively involved in the artists' process of making music. Eicher also stands out as a producer with the rare gift of being able to sequence music in a way that makes a recording more than a collection of separate pieces; instead, Eicher's sequencing ensures that ECM recordings—whether for the more improv-centric regular series or form-based New Series—possess an arc that makes them best experienced as a whole: stories, then, with a most distinct beginning, middle and end.
It's a skill that was particularly on display when Eicher personally selected and sequenced music for a series of listening stations at Munich's Haus der Kunst, which curated the ECM: A Cultural Archeology exhibition and series of concerts that ran from November, 2012 through to early February, 2013, and was documented in a lavish and informative book by the same name, along with the six-disc Selected Signs III-VIII (ECM, 2014), which collected Eicher's playlists into a revelatory box set of music that drew connections between seemingly disparate musics that few but someone intimately involved in their creation would hear...but which become perfectly clear upon listening.
Celebrating Pärt's 80th birthday and three decades of shared collaboration , Musica Selecta: A Sequence by Manfred Eicher is a well-stocked two-CD set the brings together eighteen pieces from twelve recordings released under Pärt's name, along with one previously unreleased composition, all selected and sequenced by Eicher to be, as the producer says in suitably sparse liner notes, "heard and experienced in a sequence. Each episode offers an insight into our shared journey. Together they evoke new associations, as the journey goes on. From long ago thus singing... begins the Clemens Brentano poem whose setting by Arvo introduces my sequence on this album. Like Brentano's nightingale, the music continues to sing."
And sing the entire 140-minute program does, whether literally on tracks like the referenced opener, "Es sang vor langen Jahren," which features soprano Susan Bickley, sparsely but sublimely supported by violinist Gidon Kremer and violist Vladimir Mendelssohn and first heard on Arbos (1987), or on wholly instrumental pieces like "Festina Lente," from 1991's Miserere—which, like all of the music on Musica Selecta, is founded on Pärt's tintinnabulism, a self-developed and continually honed compositional technique rooted in (and can thus be considered as) minimalism, but which shares little of the strong pulses that so often defined minimalist works by Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley.
Instead, tintinnabulism—initially inspired by chant music—is exquisitely meditative music largely predicated on slow tempi and typified by two voices: one, the tintinnabular voice, which arpeggiates the tonic triad; and the second, which moves diatonically in a stepwise motion. Pärt's early exploration of this technique reveals tintinnabulism perhaps most clearly on "Für Alina," first performed in Tallinn in 1976 but only released on Alina in 1999, where pianist Alexander Malter performs the piece twice, the two versions both bookended and separated by three versions of the similarly sparse "Spiegel im Spiegel," where the pianist is joined by clarinetist Vladimir Spivakov. Musica Selecta includes the first version of "Für Alina," a piece that almost defies possibility by starting out very quietly...and becoming even quieter as it develops, until there's barely anything left at all.
"Für Alina" perfectly exemplifies the description that Pärt's wife, Nora, has provided to explain the foundation of tintinnabulism, being "born from a deeply rooted desire for an extremely reduced sound world which could not be measured, as it were, in kilometres, or even metres, but only in millimetres....By the end the listening attention is utterly focused. At the point after the music has faded away it is particularly remarkable to hear your breath, your heartbeat, the lighting or the air conditioning system, for example." (John Kelman)

ARVO PÄRT Adam's Lament

I’ve always been an admirer of Arvo Pärt’s music, and certain works I love. But also, at times I’ve started to feel a little burnout with successive releases, which recycle a certain sober, austere, mystical mood. Thus it’s with great pleasure that I can recommend this disc unqualifiedly. It is a complete success, and has some of the composer’s most satisfying music that I’ve heard in quite some time. The reasons for this are:
First, the pieces are quite varied, despite all being clearly from the hand of the same creator. The largest work (over 20 minutes) Adam’s Lament , was a joint 2010 commission of the cities of Istanbul and Tallinn, setting a text by the monk Staretz Silouan (1866-1938), and in keeping with its circumstances, seems to use melodic Middle Eastern modes more than I’m accustomed to in Pärt. But then the disc ends with two lullabies that in their gentle folksiness seem almost like Ländler. At times we hear austere chant, which may suddenly erupt in choral tutti (as Statuit ei Dominus ). At other times there is the bare-boned counterpoint of neomedievalism ( Alleluia-Tropus ). In Salve regina I hear a fullness of harmony and texture that reminds me of Brahms. So the expressive and technical range is satisfyingly broad.
Second, the pacing of all these works has a rightness, no matter how long or short they are. Pärt has truly mastered the control of how any given sound or ensemble fits its proper temporal space, and the rate at which it unfolds. This is one thing that gives the work a quality for which we use words like “natural” and “inevitable”.
Third, the orchestration is masterful. It never stands out unduly, the sound is very full and blended, even when scored for chamber orchestra (again, a Brahmsian virtue). And yet there are also very special touches; examples being more string harmonics and pizzicato than I remember from earlier works, subtle chime tolls in Beatus Petronius , and an accompaniment of cellos that is like a viol consort in L’Abbé Agathon.
Finally, it’s gorgeously performed and recorded. This release has the best possible balance between ECM’s emphasis on highly reverberant acoustics and a clarity that serves the music in its detail. Early in the season, but a Want List contender. (FANFARE: Robert Carl)