Current listening
Munich in December: year fading, leaden skies, chilly dampness... Time for some "Bavarian" music. No, not the Oktoberfest sort, more the kind favoured by Manfred Eicher, the Munich producer whose ECM, or Edition of Contemporary Music, label has proved that there's a global audience for contemporary classical music. Eicher made his name in the early seventies recording Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and other progressive jazz stars. Then, in 1978, he released Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich and a new vista opened.
Although the music of Arvo P䲴 has appeared on more than two hundred CDs, there's almost universal agreement that the Estonian composer's best work has been captured on the ten recordings in ECM's P䲴 series.
It was the great Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer who did most to introduce Arvo P䲴's music to the West and he features on ECM's first P䲴 album, Tabula Rasa, which appeared in 1984. In many ways, it's his most imposing recording. "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" pays homage to the great modern English composer who influenced P䲴's music so much, while "Fratres" is mesmerizingly simple with Kremer giving of his best. "Tabula Rasa", the title track, is filled with transcendental bell ringing created by chamber orchestra, two solo violins and a piano "prepared" in the John Cage style.
After Tabula Rasa came Arbos (1988), which ends with "Stabat Mater", a major sacred statement. The build up comprises six smaller works, including the exquisitely sad "Pari Intervallo". In 1989, The Passion According to Saint John was released and ensuing ECM releases continued the religious theme employing the by now familiar format of plaintive string elegies alternating with devotional vocals: Miserere (1991), Te Deum (1993), and Litany (1996). Only serious P䲴 addicts, however, can be expected to hand over money for his Kanon Pokajanen (1998), a hugely forbidding setting of the Russian Orthodox canon of repentance.
Munich in December: chilly dampness, leaden skies, year fading?score by Arvo P䲴.
Thanks to colleague Birgit Roberts for an extended loan of Tabula Rasa and Arbos, and thanks, too, to David Pinkerton, whose Arvo P䲴 Information Archive is devoted to the analysis and appreciation of the music of the Estonian composer.
