Arvo Fratres

This seminal disc now almost seems like the manifesto for a whole new strain of minimalism that has found an enormously receptive audience. It represented a breakthrough for Estonian composer Arvo Part, whose music–like that of his European colleagues John Tavener and Henryk Gуrecki–pursues an austerely beautiful simplicity that suggests spiritual illumination. Fratres, given here in two versions, one for piano and violin and the other for 12 cellos, repeatedly intones a sequence resembling chant to convey a sensibility that seems at once archaic and beyond time. Violinist Gidon Kremer, for whom Part wrote the exquisitely contemplative and hypnotic title work, grasps the music's koan-like idiom, allowing an inner fullness to resonate through the most fragile, ethereal wisps of tone against the mysterious clangings of prepared piano.

Arvo Part - Choral & Instrumental Works (2004) {EMI Virgin 2CD Set}
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© 2004 EMI Records / Virgin Classics | 7243 5 62434 2 2
Classical / Choral / Instrumental

Heard a track on Radio 3, so bought this as a 'taster' of Pärt's music. A superb introduction, and play it frequently! Born at Paide in Estonia in 1935, a pupil of Heino Eller at Tallinn Conservatory, sometime sound engineer at Estonian Radio, and first prize-winner at the All-Union Young Composers' Competition in Moscow in 1962, Arvo Part, who emigrated to the west with his family in 1980, is one of the leading figures in contemporary music. He had been working with twelve-tone composition and serialism, as well as collage and aleatory techniques, but after a long period of virtual silence when he made a deep and searching study of plainsong, French and Franco-Flemish music of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and the traditions of orthodox sacred music, he engaged in a major reassessment of his own style, emerging in 1976 to effect a renewal of his language.

Time flows and stands still in this contemplative music that sounds old and new and yet neither old nor new, naive art and higher mathematics, a child‘s game, a glass bead game, like first steps and last words – all rolled into one. The compositions that Arvo Pärt has been writing for almost half a century defy any labelling or ideology. In his anachronistic art, the Estonian composer – who emigrated from the Soviet Union with his family in 1980 and found a refuge in (West) Berlin – chose the path of renunciation, reduction, and voluntary poverty. The most famous testimony to this musical conversion is undoubtedly Fratres (“Brothers”), which was written in 1977 but has appeared in all kinds of different instrumentations and versions over the years. In its ascetic austerity and almost liturgical solemnity, Fratres is reminiscent of a communal prayer or a spiritual act.