NFM Wrocław Philharmonic / Tõnu Kaljuste ARVO PÄRT The Symphonies

Here are all four of Arvo Pärt’s symphonies, newly recorded with the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic under the direction of one of Pärt’s most trusted colleagues, conductor Tõnu Kaljuste. Each of the symphonies, as the great Estonian composer has noted, is a world unto itself. Heard in chronological order, they also tell us much about Pärt’s musical and spiritual odyssey, and the very different ways in which he has exercised his craft. Forty-five years separate his Symphony No. 1 (“Polyphonic”) written in 1963 while he was still a student of Heino Eller, from his Symphony No. 4 (“Los Angeles”) written in 2008, by which time he was the world’s most widely-performed contemporary composer, and one whose now famous “tintinnabuli-style” has become an immediately identifiable artistic signature.

In presenting the works together, Tõnu Kaljuste considers them as “if they were a single grand symphony. I perceive Arvo Pärt’s creations as a biographical narrative, and hope that with the sound of the entirety of the music on this album we can refresh our memory of Pärt’s journey. It began with an entry into the neo-classical and serialist world, moved on with a composition that incorporated the use of collage, continued under the influence of early sacred music and - with the fourth symphony -  arrived at a confession-like music, with a sound world supported by prayer, penitence and suffering.”

 “To study and listen to symphonies is, in essence, to read and comprehend a biography in notes,” writes Wolfang Sandner in his liner essay, going on to trace many of the correspondences between the notes in Pärt’s scores and the changes taking place in the composer’s life.  In 1968, Pärt embarked upon an intense period of study that found him reevaluating Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame school, and Renaissance polyphony. The first signs of this study were felt in the Symphony No. 3 in 1971.

Wolfgang Sandner: “Pärt did not bury his head in the sand of music history in an effort to shut out the present. Like an archaeologist, he explored ancient compositional devices and realised what power can still be drawn from them with the knowledge of our day and a renunciation of all fashionable accessories. Pärt's method has irrevocably become his own personal style of composition. It has given birth to an entire cosmos of masterpieces, from such early instrumental works as Tabula rasa, Fratres, Summa and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten to the large-scale choral and orchestral works Berliner Messe, Litany, Stabat Mater, Passio and Te Deum to his many pieces of chamber music and a cappella compositions, including the monumental Kanon Pokajanen.” (ECM Records)

ARVO PÄRT In Principio

The eagerly-awaited new Pärt: Released 25 years after the Estonian composer started ECM’s New Series (“Tabula Rasa”, 1984), “In Principio” offers six compositions of different scale and instrumentation written between 1989 and 2005 thus allowing for an impressive overview of Pärt’s recent stylistic development.

The dramatic 25-minute “In principio” for mixed choir and large orchestra sets the famous opening of the gospel of St. John, “In principio erat Verbum”. In its five movements, “tintinnabuli”-diatonicism is contrasted with sophisticated harmonic procedures, massive brass chords are juxtaposed with almost stoic calm in the choir.

With most of Pärt’s more recent works, the score (2003) was written in response to a major commission. 

The purely orchestral “La Sindone” (The holy shroud), mirroring the textile’s symbolic shine-through effects in delicate string-textures, was premièred in Turin during the 2006 Winter Olympics whereas “Caecilia, vergine romana” for mixed choir and orchestra is a commission from the organisation for the celebration of the jubilee of Rome in 2000.

“Da pacem Domine”, one of Pärt’s most serenely beautiful pieces responded in a very subtle way to the 2004 terror attacks in Madrid’s Atocha station. The piece which could be heard a cappella on the 2005- release “Lamentate” appears here in a striking new version with choir and strings. 

The programme is completed by two instrumental compositions, “Mein Weg” (1989 / 1999 / 2000) and “Für Lennart in memoriam” a very still piece for the late Estonian president Lennart Georg Meri.

The exemplary interpretations by some of the best and most faithful Pärt specialists were recorded in Estonia with the assistance of the composer and will surely make for one of the strongest 2009 releases on ECM. (ECM Records)

ARVO PÄRT Orient Occident

This programme represents a retreat from the remote cloister where for so long Arvo Pärt invited us to join him‚ a definite shift from the aerated tintinabuli. The purity remains‚ so do the spare textures and‚ to a limited extent‚ earlier stylistic traits. Pärt’s voice is always recognisable. And yet who‚ years ago‚ could have anticipated the tempered tumult that erupts in the third movement of Como cierva sedienta‚ a half­hour choral drama commissioned by the Festival de Mœsica de Canarias and premièred in Tenerife in 1999.
I remember hearing an imperfect taped copy of that first performance‚ which both fascinated and perplexed me‚ but this new recording subscribes to ECM’s well­tried aesthetic where clarity‚ fine­tipped detail and carefully gauged perspectives are familiar priorities. The texts come from the 42nd and 43rd Psalms‚ opening with ‘As the hart panteth…’ (Psalm 42). Even in the first few seconds‚ after chorus and bell have registered‚ vivid instrumental colour signals a fresh departure. It’s almost as if Pärt is relishing textures previously denied him‚ like a penitent released from fasting. Take the second movement‚ ‘Why art thou cast down‚ my soul?’‚ which opens among lower strings then switches to tactile pizzicati and woodwinds that are almost Tchaikovskian in their post­Classical delicacy. At 2'36" an unexpected upwards harp glissando cues a rhythmically driven affirmation of praise. The descent from flutes‚ down to bass clarinet and finally bassoon that closes the piece is a really imaginative touch. That aforementioned ‘eruption’ occurs at 1'42" into the next movement‚ with its fearsome waterspouts and billowing waves‚ its bass drum‚ brass‚ bell‚ swirling winds and cymbal spray. The long closing section is pensive but conclusive: a dramatic opening‚ drum taps that recall Shostakovich 11‚ expressively varied instrumental commentary‚ quiet string chords later on and a closing episode filled with equivocal tranquillity.
The two shorter works are also significant. Wallfahrtslied (1984‚ ‘Song of Pilgrimage’)‚ a memorial to a friend‚ is presented in the revised version for strings and men’s choir. Again Pärt engages a lyrical muse‚ particularly for the emotionally weighted prelude and postlude whereas the accompaniment to the main text (Psalm 121‚ ‘I lift up mine eyes unto the hills…’)‚ a combination of pizzicato and shuddering bowed phrases‚ suggests a lament tinged with anger.
The seven­minute string piece Orient and Occident is barely two years old‚ and has ‘a monophonic line which runs resolutely through [it]’‚ to quote Pärt’s wife‚ Nora. Snake­like oriental gestures‚ coiled with prominent portamenti (the sort used by Indian orchestras) sound like an Eastern variant of Pärt’s earlier string works. ‘With perfect consistency‚ like links in a chain‚’ writes Nora‚ ‘tiny contrasting musical segments […] converge‚ yet produce a gently flowing stream of music.’ I’ll certainly buy that‚ but the choral pieces are the prime reasons for investing in this exceptional and musically important release. (Gramophone)

ARVO PÄRT Symphony No. 4

Nobody, I think, would have predicted a Symphony from Arvo Pärt nearly 40 years after his last one. But since No 3 he has developed a vocabulary of a singular intensity and cohesion, which is something he was grasping for, and not quite finding, while still in his native Estonia in 1971. That vocabulary has been established by means of an extended series of choral works, linked ever more clearly with his Orthodox faith but employing an ever-expanding range of musical and linguistic colour. That confidence – evinced most clearly, perhaps, and most recently in the majestic Kanon Pokajanen, fragments of which complement the new Symphony – has transferred itself in no uncertain terms to his instrumental work.

There has probably never been a symphony like this, though one can in some way imagine Bruckner approving of it, and it has a precedent in La Sindone from 2006. Inspired by the Canon to the Guardian Angel (an Orthodox devotional text), it harks back to a Bachian pre-tintinnabuli history, but with the slow lushness characteristic of the composer’s recent work. I find it difficult to comment on the work structurally, so much of a continuous stream is it, but it is important precisely to emphasise the astonishing feeling for that very continuity that the LAPO under Salonen clearly has. The sheer beauty of the sound – and the silence – also does not escape them (I wonder if there is any orchestra on the planet that can make pizzicatos sound as sensuous as this?), but that is also part of the work’s never-ending line. Repeated listening brings great rewards: this is a true symphony for the 21st century. (Ivan Moody / Gramophone)

Anja Lechner / Kadri Voorand TONU KORVITS Mirror

Mirror is the first ECM New Series album from Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvitz (born 1969), who emphasizes his links to his homeland’s music at several levels. The album begins with a fantasy on a song by Veljo Tormis. Like the older composer,   Kõrvitz has been influenced by folk song and archaic musical tradition, which find their echo in the refined and texturally-rich spectrum of his own, labyrinthine pieces.  His music is well served here by the Tallin Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber under  Tõnu Kaljuste’s assured direction and by soloist Anja Lechner.  Lechner’s cello is foregrounded in Peegeldused Tasaset Maast (2013),  Laul (2012, rev. 2013) and the album’s largest piece Seitsme  Linnu Seitse Und (2009, rev. 2012), a collaboration with the poet Maarja Kangro, which is both choral suite and cello concerto. In these “seven dreams of seven birds” the choir sings in Estonian and English and the cello conjures both birdsong and swooping flight.  Tasase Maa (“Song of the Plainland”), a fresh arrangement of a Tormis melody has Kadri Voorand as vocal soloist, supported by strings and by Tõnu Kõrvitz on kannel, the Estonian psaltery. (ECM Records)

Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir / Tõnu Kaljuste VELJO TORMIS Litany To Thunder

Since the 1992 release of Forgotten Peoples, the first major survey of Veljo Tormis to be released outside of Russia, ECM has paved an international appreciation of the Estonian composer, whose choral output exceeds 500 pieces. More than number, it is the melodic and textual content of those pieces that asks of the listener attention to source, meaning, and atmosphere. Although so much of Tormis’s work is drawn from Baltic folk traditions, his project is more one of expression than of preservation. He paints a distinct amalgam of texts and motifs, so that what we are left with is a sonic trajectory that moves ever forward. There is no group more qualified to follow that trajectory than the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste, these intensely talented singers breathe the music on Litany To Thunder as if it were their own. (ECM Reviews)

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra / Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir / Tõnu Kaljuste GESUALDO

The music of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1566-1613) has exerted a powerful influence on composers down the ages. His highly-charged, mannerist, idiosyncratic vocal music constitutes “a gallery of dramatically-lit portraits of human emotions with a heavy emphasis on the extremes of joy and despair” (to quote former Hilliard Ensemble singer Gordon Jones). Amongst the most experimental and expressive music of its period, it continues to invite reinterpretation and modern responses. 

On this album, recorded in Estonia at Tallinn’s Methodist Church, we hear contemporary composition inspired by Gesualdo, as well as new arrangements of his work. The album opens with a radiant version of Moro Lasso from the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1611) in a transcription for string orchestra by Tõnu Kaljuste. This serves to set the scene for Carlo, a major ‘biographical’ piece based on the life and music of Gesualdo, written by Australian composer Brett Dean in 1997. Dean writes, “With Carlo Gesualdo one should not try to separate his music from his life and times. The texts of his later madrigals, thought to be written by Gesualdo himself, abound with references to love, death, guilt and self-pity. Combine this with the fact that I have always found his vocal works to be one of music’s most fascinating listening experiences and you have the premise for my piece.” Carlo takes up the opening chorale from Moro lasso. Then a vocal collage unfolds, and quotes from the madrigal are also taken up and developed further by the orchestra – until we arrive at the sound-world of 20^th century music. By “moving between two time-zones” musically, Dean conveys a sense of Gesualdo’s troubled psyche. Carlo was originally scored for fifteen solo strings, sampler and pre-recorded tape, but conductor Tõnu Kaljuste suggested presenting it with live singers. Successful experiments with this in 2002 in Stockholm paved the way for the present recording. 

Kaljuste also encouraged the writing of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s string arrangement of O crux benedicta. The initial motive of this 1603 Gesualdo piece provides the compositional underpinning for Tüür’s L’ombra della croce (2015) for string orchestra. Tüür dedicates the piece to producer Manfred Eicher, “in honour of how he has encompassed both early and contemporary music in the remarkable adventure that is the ECM New Series.”
Psalmody is without a Gesualdo-inspired subtext but it too cross-references older and newer music, within the narrower time-frame of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s own oeuvre. When Tüür wrote Psalmody for the early music ensemble Hortus Musicus in 1993 he was looking back at the music he had composed for his experimental “chamber rock” group ‘In Spe’ in the period 1979-82, so the piece already incorporated a retrospective element.
Tüür revised the work in 2005 and, after hearing a version by Hortus Musicus with the Collegium Musicale choir, revised it again in 2011. Tüür: “I re-orchestrated the entire score – or rather, I recomposed it, brought balance to the form and made additions to the choral element. This is a unique piece for me…The musical idea behind the composition dates back over thirty years. The latest version essentially represents a sort of minimalism derived from rhythmic patterns and intonations characteristic of various traditions of the European Renaissance and Baroque.” (ECM Records)

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)

Tõnu Kaljuste / Tallinn Chamber ERKKI-SVEN TÜÜR Crystallisatio

"Erkki-Sven Tüür's music," writes Wolfgang Sander, "sounds as if it had strolled through the history of music assimilating theoretical inspiration and practical experience along the way. Then it seems to have wrapped itself up in a cocoon, immune to the outside world, there to develop its own contours, as indicated by the abrupt contrasts. Tüür's music is realistic; it has confidence in its historical references, but it is removed." One could add that Tüür's "removal" from the international new music community was hardly his own choice: his compositional approach was established in an enforced political and geographical isolation. The same, of course, can be said for many of the composers from the former Soviet Union who, between them, have created music of enormous diversity. Tüür is impatient with the Western journalistic habit of bracketing together all post-Soviet composers as if they represented a recognizable "genre", while, at the same time, he acknowledges that every artist, whether he wishes it to be the case or not, is inevitably a product of his environment. Is his work, then, intrinsically "Estonian?" "Maybe there is something, related to the general 'Nordic' way of seeing the world, influenced by the specific geographical area, by how dark and short the days are in winter, and how light and short the nights are in summer." Tüür's New Series debut opens with Archtectonics VI, written in 1992, a characteristically "rhetorical" work that pits quasi-minimal writing for strings against serial parts for flute, clarinet and vibraphone; serialism ultimately gains the upper hand in this particular debate. Passion (1993) for strings, which follows, builds from the slow filling of space with double bass and cellos in the lowest register to sound-clusters for violins in the high register. Illusion, a partner-piece for Passion and composed the same year, deconstructs a baroque motif. Wolfgang Sander describes it as a "disrupted litany... one hundred and eleven measures composed as if in rapture." Crystallisatio (1995) for three flutes, campanelli, strings and live electronics, is particularly mysterious and beguiling. The sound potential of the flutes is subtly expanded by electronic processing and digital delay. Requiem (1994) was written in tribute to Peeter Lilje, chief conductor of the Estonian State Orchestra, a close friend of the composer who died in 1993 at the age of 43. Tüür sets the text of the Catholic mass for the dead.

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)

Tõnu Kaljuste / Tallinn Chamber Orchestra / Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir ARVO PÄRT Te Deum

A richly realized collection of prayers that brings deep, resounding enlightenment to the ears. Everything about this compact disc feels like Arvo Pärt's master work, right down to the gorgeous photos in the accompanying booklet. "Te Deum" opens patiently and ominously, then proceeds to run the spectrum between overflowing swells and hushed contemplation. The Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir breathe as one under the magnificent direction of Tönu Kaljuste for this and "Berliner Messe," the closing mass that parts the clouds with its stark beauty and pious rejoicing (the third passage within the mass, "Erster Alleluiavers," is a brief teardrop of reverence that even atheists would ponder). Elsewhere, the a cappella chorus of "Magnificat" shines with vocals that embrace the church walls with chills and crispness, like a beam of moonlight through winter. One of the composer's strengths has always been to find the depth in simplicity. To this end, ever-present ECM producer Manfred Eicher's sparse and beautiful sensibilities fit Arvo Pärt like a glove, especially with "Silouans Song," which blossoms in stoic waves of strings. Such bittersweet longing resides here ("My soul yearns after the Lord") that a little sadness seems to slip out through all the reverence. This is uniformly his finest album, but by no means does it encompass all he has to offer. The compositions in Te Deum may not reveal Pärt's more eclectic and thunderous side, but few other albums carry such a consistent theme. 

Te Deum stands as one of ECM’s most enduring testaments to the powerful symbiosis between sound and silence. With this recording, label and composer transformed the aural landscape of this one faithful listener. This is a recording to change lives and one that will forever stand the test of time, for it is time incarnate.