Arvo Pärt – Passio

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Arvo Pärt, Hilliard Ensemble, Passio, Paul Hillier, sacred music, Tintinnabuli

Humility, surrender, transcendence

Arvo Pärt’s transcendent music is always a deep experience, demanding attention and engagement from the listener. And whilst the musical lines may seem simple, they are not simplistic, and leave nowhere for musician or singer to hide. Without fidelity and surrender, his music can seem like some kind of technical exercise. Which is very very far from what it is.

Being lucky enough to attend a recent concert performance of Passio, sent me back to listen to The Hilliard Ensemble rendition, conductor Paul Hillier. This is a long piece, and not one for our InstaGratification Hummable Tunes culture. It is not, in any way, a ‘background piece’ and unfolds itself through its single, 70 minute, unbroken movement. How can ‘The Passion’ be properly realised, glimmeringly felt, if the journey is not undertaken, and ‘snapshot moments’ only are listened to on the hoof?

This music in its purity and careful threading and weaving, requires an extraordinary precision and control to hold the length, flow and placement of the close, dissonant harmonies.

From the crushing, almost overwhelmingly heavy opening of the piece, hopeless, doom laden, arises beautiful, single threads of music and voices, offering, surely some tenderness, some way out of despair, despite suffering. The bass, solo lines of Jesus are steadfast and firm, and musically give a kind of foundation for the other voices, and musical lines to relate to. To sorrowfully, tenderly, and in the end – not quite triumphally, but with the possibility of achieving something hopeful, out of pain, out of despair, soar. The end both breaks, and releases, the heart.

This is indeed a fabulous rendition. Though the experience, of course, of a live performance – The Façade Ensemble, conductor Benedict Collins Rice, offers an intensity that solitary attentiveness to a recording, can never do

This particular version may no longer be easily available as a new CD, though market place (used) copies are available or download on MP3. And of course, though the technical quality might be somewhat flawed, you can at least hear it on You Tube

The Hilliard Ensemble, alas, disbanded three years ago. Oh that I had ever heard them deliver this live!Paul Hillier was a founder member of The Hilliards and, later of Theatre of Voices. Hilliard was named for the Elizabethan miniaturist, I believe, rather than for Hillier, though perhaps the connection suggested itself

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Arvo Part – Tintinnabuli – The Tallis Scholars

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Arvo Pärt, Classical music review, Peter Phillips, Tallis Scholars, Tintinnabuli

Happy Birthday, Arvo Pärt, from The Tallis Scholars

The Tallis Scholars’ tribute to one of my favourite composers, Arvo Pärt, in his 80th year, is a beautifully executed performance of some of Pärt’s shorter choral works

Pärt is a deeply reflective composer. Many of his compositions are intensely transcendent, mystical, numinous. He is unostentatious, there is little flamboyant, bravura, glamorous expression, and perhaps because of that ability to strip to a sparse and sometimes simple core his works are profoundly intense.

The Tallis Scholars, under the direction of Peter Phillips, like Pärt himself, get their individual personality vocals out of the way, and let the music itself sing, apparently effortlessly.

My only cavil is a curious one, to do with programming and the generous length of the CD itself.

Because most of Pärt’s works, even the lightest, have such a powerful intensity it became (for this listener) too overwhelming to listen straight through to 8 works, as most of them left me rather reeling in an altered state.

Back in the old days of vinyl records, the limits of equipment and disc meant that a record was around 20 minutes maximum per side, and listening rather became structured into a roughly 40 minute whole, with a half way break to turn over. But because CDs can be far longer, the buyer can have a feeling of being cheated at paying the same price for a 40 minute CD as for a far longer one, so there is a subtle push coming from the buyer wanting more for their buck, and producers, compilers and the like stuff the package more fully. And sometimes pieces, however well written or performed, do feel like ‘fillers’

This was certainly the case for me here. There are some standout pieces, and a more modest CD length might have lost 2 or 3 of the works, and kept every piece as a stunning, shining jewel. It isn’t that any of the works are poor, it is that some of them are exceptional and I rather wanted all of them to be so. I would have lost Which Was The Son Of, The Woman With The Alabaster Box and Tribute to Caesar.

The opening 7 movement Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen is surely one of the jewels. Tallis use 2 voices to each of the vocal lines. This particular piece effortlessly rings with Pärt’s trademark ‘tintinnabuli’, those bell like overtones, the close, beautifully on the edge of discordance, edgy close harmonies. There is something about this kind of harmonic work which, every time, tugs the heart, and causes tears to flow. Some kind of impossible longing for musical resolution, whilst also staying within what is unresolved.

The bookend piece which closes the CD, Triodion (the opening and the closing pieces are the longest by far, each about 13 minutes) is another, different, stunner. The text of this piece is in English. Most of the pieces – all sacred texts, or extracts from the Bible, are in Latin, and the CD comes with a good liner, giving the texts in several translations

In Triodion, which must surely have been fiendish to perform, though Tallis do it seemingly without strain and effort, Pärt overlaps and opposes rhythms and sung lines in the same way that he usually does with the harmonics. He creates a dynamic with those tight, unusual harmonies which are more familiar in some of the Eastern European countries than in Western European music, and here the addition of the pleasing and diverging entry points to the sung lines is delicious, a kind of tease and tickle to the eardrum which made me shiver with delight

These two pieces in particular are the ones which draw me in, to listen and experience most closely.

I hope Arvo appreciated his tribute from Tallis!

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Arvo Part – Lamentate

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Alexei Lubimov, Andrey Boreyko, Anish Kapoor, Arvo Pärt, Classical music, Classical music review, Hilliard Ensemble, Lamentate, Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra

Bleak, deep and curiously comforting

I’ve been devotedly in thrall to the pared down, often stripped to the bone, music of Arvo Part, for some years. Part, arguably Estonia’s best known citizen, created his particular style of minimalism, ‘tintinnabuli’, based on the close harmonic overtones heard in the ‘tintinnabulation’ when a bell is struck. Part’s stunning music is not just empty stylistics, however, but always arises from his own deep connection to the numinous, to deep reflection, to his faith.

Nearly 80 now, he continues to sear the listener with the potency and deep reflection in his work. His music is always something best listened to with full, awake, attention. And the silence and space between notes is as much part of the soundscape as the heard music.

Hilliard, Da Pacem Domine

This particular CD consists of 2 works, a short a capella choral piece, Da Pacem Domine, beautifully floated by The Hilliard Ensemble, and a long orchestral piece Lamentate.

Anish Kapoor Marsyas. Flicr, Commons 2, non commercial use. Matt Hobbs

Lamentate was inspired when Part saw Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas in The Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, and had a kind of cataclysmic, cathartic experience from how he was affected by it. ‘Lamentate’ is not a lament, as is often the case in sacred ‘Lamentations’ for the dead, it is a lamentation for the living – for the fact that we are all in relationship to the knowledge of our own, individual mortality. Whether we consciously seek to live with awareness of that, or whether we live in denial, it shapes us.

As Part’s notes on this piece reflect :

I have written a lamento – not for the dead, but for the living, who have to deal with these issues for themselves. A lamento for us, struggling with the pain and hopelessness of the world.

Here is the whole of Lamentate, in a version with Diana Liiv, piano. Lexington Symphony, conductor Jonathan McPhee. Sound quality not wonderful though

From the crushing, weighty opening two movements, where it almost feels as if an implacable indifferent force will roll over the listeners, annihilating them, in the third movement small, fragile, simple, beautiful and hesitant pause filled lines of melody arise, carried by the solo piano. Later, these lines, are taken up, turn by turn, by other instruments. It’s almost like an offer and an acceptance of tenderness, some comfort from another. Again and again, there are musical lines which arise, phrases which never quite complete and resolve – the ending is inevitable, but the answer can only be a kind of accommodation, a trying, a beauty created from a greater embodiment, so the ‘being here’ is more and more fully realised.

These crushings, these solo questings, these arisings of musical line from the solo piano which are then taken up, questioned again by other instruments, are like some kind of manifestation of grace – the comfort of human consolation and connection in the face of the inevitability of death

Part’s own history and background in devotional music is within the Eastern Orthodox Church, but there are even threads of musical influences from Arabic music in one of the movements, Lamentabile.

The whole movement of the piece, with the return, again and again to the knowledge of our mortality which shapes our living, is towards a deepening richness that comes from ‘living with knowledge’

And, though not in any way (obviously!) a great fanfare of a triumphal piece, it is a piece which is astonishingly beautiful, moving…and though I surrendered to it quite viscerally, getting flattened by the implacable opening, slowly having little green shoots of growth, moving towards the light of day, connecting, and then being flattened, the whole was about ‘responding in the here and now’

As I reflected (as the piece makes the listener do so) I was reminded of the work of existentialist humanist psychotherapist Irving Yalom, and his books, specifically, Love’s Executioner and Staring At The Sun. This music takes the same journey, and encourages ‘Living Awake’

The performance in my CD version, (not the You Tube version here) is from the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, with Alexei Lubimov, piano, and conducted by Andrey Boreyko. And it is all magnificent.

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Arvo Pärt – Alina

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Alina, Arvo Pärt, Classical music, Für Alina, Music review, Spiegel im Spiegel

“And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”
T.S.Eliot : Four Quartets, Little Gidding

How can something so slow and so outrageously simple be so profound? If you sit down and break apart Spiegel im Spiegel note by note, it is seemingly nothing, a repetition over and over, scarcely travelling, which ought to be trite. Yet nothing in the previous sentence is true. Instead there is something heart-stopping, so sad, so dignified, so quietly resolute, so possessed of humility, so mysterious, so humane that it becomes almost unbearably overwhelming. To listen to this analytically is to find oneself doubting and mocking oneself in one’s purple prosiness. But the point of it is not to approach the music (or an experience which feels true, in the way this music does) with that sort of cynicism. I don’t know how Part does what he does, all I know is there is truth here.

Fur Alina is more open, more spare, there are spaces between the notes, which, if the listener waits inside, resisting the tendency to want to rush forward to a resolution, is like the offering of a dizzying freedom of choice – putting me in mind of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken :

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

The CD repeats the tracks, playing Spiegel im Spiegel, with different instruments, 3 times and Fur Alina, the solo piano piece, twice, by the same pianist, but on separate occasions. This adds to the profundity, to the sense of being unable to step into the same river twice. Everything has changed, although everything remains the same. The paradox of stillness at the heart of motion.

Arvo Pärt – Alina Amazon UK
Arvo Pärt – Alina Amazon USA
For some reason, the UK site has this to download/hear samples, the USA site only has the CD

Arvo Pärt – Sanctuary

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Arvo Pärt, Classical music, Music review, sacred music

Music arising out of, and returning into, the empty space

Arvo Pärt’s sense of the numinous imbues his music. It would be difficult to imagine a composer without a spiritual faith creating this – not just because clearly some of the tracks come out of a tradition of Christian choral music.

This is music which demands the listener settles into spacious, unyearning waiting. Many tracks arise out of a quite long period of no-sound, a prolonged pause, and this is part of the piece itself.

The opening track Cantus In Memoriam, Benjamin Britten, starts with a typical Part single bell, there is an opening, high transcendency, an ascending, and the journey of the piece then continues to slowly build textures and layers of strings, getting deeper and more sombre, more dense, more clay like, a body returning to the earth, to burial, the bell notes now sombre.

The second track teases with similarities at the opening to another piece which comes from a relationship to death, and to faith, Gorecki – Symphony No.3: Sorrowful Songs

The vocal pieces are sweet and grave, even ‘Magnificat’ is quiet in its fullness

Pärts approach to faith is personal, self-effacing. There’s little triumphalism, little ostentation, few grandly glorious moments of easy comforts. The music is curiously humble, surrendering, the use of strings drawn out endless sostenuto, slow repetitions of phrases, slow accretions of texture, unfoldings, returns, and again unfoldings and infoldings. This is faith that can embrace despair, deep grief, and doubt. I have experienced hearing Part’s music live, in concert. It is the experience of joint meditation practice, silent contemplation, guided and supported by music which is always connected to an eternal, dynamic stillness.

The only track which hints that this quiet place, though always present, is also readily lost, is the final piece, the aptly named Tabula Rasa for 2 violins, ‘prepared piano’ and chamber orchestra. The violins arise out of that still place, and again and again are briefly interrupted by a repeating rush of short piano interjections; these go nowhere, and fall back down into the stillness of sustained and twining strings. A very beautiful mirroring of a meditation practice, where out of silence, the mind emerges into chatter, and can be allowed to sink again into the dynamic no-thing, from whence again thoughts will arise, scurry and be allowed to dissolve.

Unfortunately I can’t find this particular CD on a link to mp3 listening, it is a collection of his pieces, with different choirs and orchestras, taken from other CDs where one choir and one orchestra performs different selections of his work

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