Arvo Pärt's asylum.

[ongakublue]

Arvo's 4th symphony was performed at the proms recently with salonen conducting, it was televised and it included interview with the composer and he came out on stage to warm applause. I think it was the UK premiere. I am not a big fan and yet I have 5 of his CDs! Watch out for that on youtube. I have noticed televised proms appearing there.

J

[Mirror Image]

Oh, there's dissonance in all Part, his style is built on it, even if in a very personal way. It's the aspect of his work which I love the most, actually, these dissonances which function unlike any other dissonance. The music seems to have been turned on its side, as someone once said, so that melody and harmony are one and function as one - his wife put it: 1+1=1 in Part's music, and it's an amazing sound.

Very good post, Luke. I agree. There's a lot of dissonance in his music that most people can't quite pick up on. It's also not an upfront dissonance either like Berg or Ligeti, it's subdued. Gorgeous sound.

I've been getting back into Part's music lately. Listened to Te Deum and Berliner Messe earlier. Now, I'm about to listen to Tabula Rasa.

[Mirror Image]

Has anyone heard this new recording with Kristjan Jarvi conducting Part's music?

[Grazioso]

Has anyone heard this new recording with Kristjan Jarvi conducting Part's music?

Arvo Pärt, DJ Hero

[Grazioso]

Don't know if this was mentioned yet, but ECM will be releasing a deluxe edition of Tabula Rasa with a 200 pp. hardback book this December.

[Mirror Image]

Don't know if this was mentioned yet, but ECM will be releasing a deluxe edition of Tabula Rasa with a 200 pp. hardback book this December.

Yes, and oh so expensive. I'll stick to the original.

[Mirror Image]

Arvo Pärt, DJ Hero

Have you heard this recording, Grazioso? It has a new chorus and string orchestra arrangement of Stabat Mater on it that looks interesting. I might just go ahead and pull the trigger on this one since nobody seems to have heard it.

[Grazioso]

Have you heard this recording, Grazioso? It has a new chorus and string orchestra arrangement of Stabat Mater on it that looks interesting. I might just go ahead and pull the trigger on this one since nobody seems to have heard it.

Not yet, but I do find the cover amusing: looks like he's playing the turntables What you mention about a new arrangement does point up one of my pet peeves about Pärt: his fiddling with the same material again and again instead of composing more totally original works.

[Mirror Image]

Not yet, but I do find the cover amusing: looks like he's playing the turntables What you mention about a new arrangement does point up one of my pet peeves about Pärt: his fiddling with the same material again and again instead of composing more totally original works.

I think it's a fair criticism to say Part rearranges his music way too often, but at the same time, I think he won't top Te Deum or Litany or Tabula Rasa or Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten anytime soon. If these were the only Part works I heard, I think it would be enough, for me, to say that he was a true musical voice with something original to say, which is more than I can say for some contemporary composers.

[Grazioso]

I think it's a fair criticism to say Part rearranges his music way too often, but at the same time, I think he won't top Te Deum or Litany or Tabula Rasa or Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten anytime soon. If these were the only Part works I heard, I think it would be enough, for me, to say that he was a true musical voice with something original to say, which is more than I can say for some contemporary composers.

I totally agree. What he does, he does extremely well. Yet I do hate to see a composer repeating himself too much or, worse, turning into a sort of self-parody--which would be easy for Pärt, given all the mystical trimmings he and his music have been decked with.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I might just go ahead and pull the trigger on this one since nobody seems to have heard it.

It's getting some good reviews - I admit I'm intrigued:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129282688

http://www.audaud.com/article?ArticleID=7994

[Rinaldo]

I've got a little story to share, sort of an introduction as this is my first post on this forum. Last spring, I was walking through Lesser Town here in Prague with my headphones on, listening to Cantus, and while I was passing next to one of the palaces, a haunting scene came into view. The fence of the palace was besieged by flowers and photographs, with candles flickering here & there, and a bunch of people whose gloomy faces were lit by the candlelight. Then it hit me – this was the evening after the Smolensk plane crash tragedy and the palace was a Polish embassy. That realization, combined with Pärt's music rising & falling like waves crashing over the deck of a ship in a storm at sea, completely overwhelmed me and I had to stop right there for a few minutes and wait until the piece was over. To this day, I still get shivers when I recall that moment. When Górecki died seven months later, my initial reaction was hearing the long, sustained finale of Cantus in my mind again.

Yes, and oh so expensive. I'll stick to the original.

It definitely is expensive (unless you're as lucky as one of my friends, who've stumbled upon one at an used bookstore in NY and bought it for 25 $) but a nice artifact to have, if you're a fan of the work. I got it for Christmas and giving Tabula Rasa another few close listens, the ECM recording seems unbeatable (although with Fratres, I very much prefer Gil Shaham's interpretation).

[bhodges]

Hi Rinaldo, and such a beautiful snapshot you wrote as your first on GMG! (Another fan of Pärt here, too.) Feel free, if you like, to post a little about yourself in the "Introductions" section, here:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/board,2.0.html

Anyway, welcome, and enjoy yourself. Would love to hear reports about what music you're hearing in Prague!

--Bruce

[Mirror Image]

I've got a little story to share, sort of an introduction as this is my first post on this forum. Last spring, I was walking through Lesser Town here in Prague with my headphones on, listening to Cantus, and while I was passing next to one of the palaces, a haunting scene came into view. The fence of the palace was besieged by flowers and photographs, with candles flickering here & there, and a bunch of people whose gloomy faces were lit by the candlelight. Then it hit me – this was the evening after the Smolensk plane crash tragedy and the palace was a Polish embassy. That realization, combined with Pärt's music rising & falling like waves crashing over the deck of a ship in a storm at sea, completely overwhelmed me and I had to stop right there for a few minutes and wait until the piece was over. To this day, I still get shivers when I recall that moment. When Górecki died seven months later, my initial reaction was hearing the long, sustained finale of Cantus in my mind again.

It definitely is expensive (unless you're as lucky as one of my friends, who've stumbled upon one at an used bookstore in NY and bought it for 25 $) but a nice artifact to have, if you're a fan of the work. I got it for Christmas and giving Tabula Rasa another few close listens, the ECM recording seems unbeatable (although with Fratres, I very much prefer Gil Shaham's interpretation).

Good to see another Part fan on here. Tabula Rasa is wonderful work, and, like you, I prefer Gidon Kremer/Schmittke on ECM to the DG recording with Shaham. For me, it's a definitive performance. I don't own the new deluxe edition (or whatever it's called), but if I didn't already own the original it would be nice to own.

[Lethevich]

I recent heard the Stabat Mater re-written by the composer for choir and string orchestra - it's one of the more horrible things I have been subjected to recently, and possibly the worst thing yet churned out by the composer. I then played the Miserere and it is growing on me. I used to have a love-hate relationship with the piece for its somewhat obnoxious combination of some of Pärt's finest tintinnabuli writing (especially the opening, a true sequel to the Stabat Mater's aching buildup), but then it goes all loud and meandery and... I just don't know. But I'm enjoying it much more this time around.

[Guido]

I recent heard the Stabat Mater re-written by the composer for choir and string orchestra - it's one of the more horrible things I have been subjected to recently, and possibly the worst thing yet churned out by the composer.

Surely you love the original for three strings and three voices though?

[Lethevich]

Surely you love the original for three strings and three voices though?

Indeedie - it's what made the re-working so depressing, it went from Ferrari to Cadillac.

I like Pärt's work for choir, even the recent ones, so I was maybe listening with too much optimism - every quality that the music had became blunted.

[not edward]

Indeedie - it's what made the re-working so depressing, it went from Ferrari to Cadillac.

I've refused to touch the reworking for precisely this reason: I can't imagine how it would be positive, given that the intimate, confessional nature of the original version is key to its effect. I suppose he must have had artistic reasons for doing it, but I can't for the life of me figure out what they'd be.

I may have to poke into Miserere again; I've thus far had rather mixed feelings about it for the same reasons as you, but I was certainly more positive about it than most if not all of the music from the last 20 years.

[Luke]

I understand precisely what Sara says about the Miserere - she is on the mark with her description. Nevertheless, somehow, I've always thought of this piece as the last of Part's great tintinabular sequence, rather than the first of the more depressingly unsatisfying tintinabulism-with-tweaks pieces he has written since. I have no technical reason to back this up, since the Miserere is full of such tweaks. But somehow, it just works, to my ears. For a start, the opening, as Sara says, is pure tintinabulism in its most refined form. The moment in the second verse when the second voice enters with 'amplius' (iirc) might be the passage I would choose to represent Part's music to a newbie, if I had to do so using only five bars of music. And then the 'loud and meandery' bit - well, think of this as an intrustion, an interpolation, which appears and disappears shortly afterwards, leaving only a very slow recovery in its wake, and it makes sense. In other words, it is not 'inside' the form of the piece but imposed from outside. It is not the inevitable next step, as everything else that happens in Part's greatest works seems to be - and this utter inevitability is what I think distnguishes him from other composers. But in itself that interpolation is every bit as inevitable as any of Part's earlier tintinabular works (it is essentially the same compositional process as in the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten or Arbos, though put through a series of variations). That self-contained perfection is why I can accept this interpolation easily; to me it is not in the slightest 'meandery.' It is the following music, the long climb out of the abyss, which seems to me to point to Part's later 'tweaks' more obviously, but somehow here he is still, to my ears, in touch with that magical wellspring he had been tapping for the last 15 or so years. Primarily, the tweaks involve key changes, really,  and as such they remove that tonal fixity which is such a hallmark of the best tintinabular Part (Later, IMO weaker pieces like the Beatitudes do this again, I think) But they do, at the same time, parallel the emotional trajectory of the piece very compellingly, and the final shft to the major almost has the miraculous inevitability of the end of the Passion. Meanwhile, those delightful little instrumental interludes, with their step-by-step increases in animation, are not a million miles away from the similar 'dance' interludes in the Stabat Mater.

Which I too will never ever want to hear in a strong orchestra version, btw!

[Lethevich]

Danke for the reply, it will be nice to listen to the second half with more of a roadmap in mind, using your suggestions.

Maybe some people could give their thoughts on the less-discussed pieces from the 90s and onwards? I am playing ECM's Orient Occident disc, and while I hadn't made a point to avoid is, despite me liking the composer in general I just hadn't thought to listen to it yet, perhaps because I never hear any discussion about the works on it (save the Wallfahrtslied).

Orient & Occident is interesting. I feel that at the tail-end of Pärt's tintinnabuli period, his works for string orchestra became a bit wilfully evasive (Silouans Song, Trisagion). They retained the aesthetic and intellectual "meaning" that had inspired a lot of the composer's pieces, but were now less concerned with actually writing something beautiful or engaging, and come across as somewhat dour. O&O is a bit different, it has a great pulsing and nagging idea which is teased around for the duration of the piece. It feels theatrical, slightly declamatory, and it's a fun listen and reminds me slightly of new-school composers such as Tüür.

Como cierva sedienta is very attractive. Rather less inward than his classic works, again somewhat dramatically paced, although I have yet to engage with the structure. The choral writing is different from earlier pieces as well, and feels closer to the mainstream of this style (Kancheli, Tavener) than it perhaps should, but the orchestral accompaniment is lithe and tidy. A saving grace in my ears is that I detect a certain strangeness to it, which when compared to a somewhat bog-standard work like In Principo is refreshing.

Also, any opinions on the Litany piece? It seems positioned just right to be good - between the decent Te Deum and the wonderful Kanon Pokajanen - but I've yet to love it. It does keep drawing my attention, which is usually a positive thing for me.