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Arvo Part's music is about equilibrium and balance ‚ balance between consonance and dissonance, between converging voices and, in the context of a CD such as this, between the individual works programmed. Stephen Layton has chosen well, starting with the variegated Berliner Messe and closing with the starkly ritualistic De profundis, a memorable and ultimately dramatic setting of Psalm 130 for...
Far from being inaccessible, Arvo Pärt's music is mesmerising, and this collection immerses the listener into a deep pool of tone colours. Pärt's De Profundis is the most powerful setting of Psalm 130 I've yet encountered. Sombre and darkly hewn, scored as it is for male voices, organ, bass drum, tam-tam and a single tubular bell, it remains, for me, the crowning glory of the disc. The Berliner...
Far from being inaccessible, Arvo Pärt's music is mesmerising, and this collection immerses the listener into a deep pool of tone colours. Pärt's De Profundis is the most powerful setting of Psalm 130 I've yet encountered. Sombre and darkly hewn, scored as it is for male voices, organ, bass drum, tam-tam and a single tubular bell, it remains, for me, the crowning glory of the disc. The Berliner...
Pärt’s music remains an object of unstinting wonder
Committed and definitive performances of this intense music.
It seems perverse, in a necessarily brief review, to make a mystery or a penance where essentially all is delight. In his short introductory notes John Rutter speaks very frankly of his own position: "I found out a long time ago that if a composer's music starts to reach too many people, it pretty soon gets attacked by those who would prefer the non-specialist public to be kept at arm's length"...