Ralph van Ratt PÄRT Piano Music

Pärt Piano Music by Naxos features pianist Ralph van Raat interpreting the Estonian composer’s music spanning over four decades. This retrospective takes us on a stylistic journey that is truly millennial in scope, while remaining reverent in spirit.

Ralph van Raat plays the allegro passages with a digital precision characteristic of post-war piano music. He imbues the largo passages…with a touching impressionistic quality.

[In] The movements the Partita, Op. 2…the musical language is decidedly modern…making full use of pitch material while not being constricted by serial techniques. The third movement is a study of chords, growing in complexity and dynamics and adhering to a touching…

The guileless simplicity of these diatonic tone-studies enables a very close identification between composer, performer, instrument, and audience, the very essence of effective music.

Van Raat is joined here by JoAnn Falletta leading the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, and I was struck by the similarity between this piano-orchestra pairing and that of other eastern European composers. As Ralph van Raat points out in the liner notes, Pärt believed that the essence of truth “is translated in music by the connection and silence between just two notes.” In these hesitant and vulnerable moments, the orchestra intones the very essence of sorrowful resignation, while the piano dutifully spins out a liturgy of mourning. This is all done not with long, balanced musical phrases or distinct melodic contour, but just a micro-focus on the event of one note being replaced by another in the most unhurried fashion. Lamentabile holds perhaps one of the most arresting English horn solos I have ever heard, fragments of middle-eastern scales appearing and disappearing over an ominous pedal; there is no resolution, but there is no urge, only the last utterances before life is extinguished and returned to the infinite.

There are many contemporary composers who receive coveted commissions, only to see their creations shelved after one performance. Arvo Pärt is that rare living artist who has managed to penetrate the finicky audiences of today and present them with something unmistakably universal. (2012 I Care If You Listen)