Collage

Arvo Pärt - Collage

Performers: Philharmonia Orchestra & Chorus, Neeme Jarvi - conductor; Boris Berman - piano

Born in 1935, Arvo Part comes from Estonia, a remote country with cultural traditions rooted in an ancestrally religious past, while being part of an aggressively secular state, the Soviet Union. It is hardly surprising that Part was divided and distracted, uncertain of identity or direction. He began by composing symphonic music roughly in Western tradition, with some kinship with Shostakovich and the solitudinous inner drama of Sibelius. We don't know much about this music since the composer disowned it; but we can understand why the Beethovenian task of wilfully imposing order on chaos proved, for Part, formidable. Desperately, he sought other ways out, briefly flirting with then fashionable serialism and with aleatoric techniques: both of which proved to be for him, technical alternatives to orthodox Western traditions, rather than imaginative and moral solutions of a creative impasse.
The earliest work on this recording, the Second Symphony of 1966, belongs to this experimental phase. It is scored for a large conventional orchestra unconventionally treated.
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During the middle sixties he paused, hesitated; and found a raft to cling to in the music of J. S. bach, who owes his crucial position in European history to his being a halfway house, looking back to the Middle Ages and to Renaissance contrapuntists, while relishing the procedures of the contemporary High Baroque, and acting as harbinger of unsuspected futures. This disc includes three collage-pieces based in a general sense on bach's idiom, with some reference to specific works by him. The earliest and longest is the Credo of 1968, which sets two fragments of holy writ for mixed chorus, piano solo and orchestra.
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The work specifically called Collage sur B.A.C.H. is scored for strings, oboe, harpsichord, and piano; and its first movement is again a minimalist 'moto perpetuo,' gradually shifting from B flat to B minor. The slow movement transcribes a noble Bach sarabande for oboe and harpsichord; then transfers it to strings and attempts to demolish it with the noise, rather than music, of note-clusters on a modern piano, embracing all the chromatic semitones within the octave.
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Part's Bach-collages, though fascinating and often startling, represent a transitional phase, linking his eclectic start to his discovery of identity in his works of the 80s and 90s. For after a self-imposed silence, Part was Born Again - not in the crude evangelical sense, but in that all his music was now concerned with the numinous. Henceforth, his music betrays a debt to monodic religious cantillation, especially that of the Orthodox Russian Church; to medieval organum and heterophony; and to the austerely mathematical polyphony of Renaissance composers like Machaut and Ockeghem, whose work Part studied during his 'silent' period. If one wants points of reference to define the nature of Part's music beyond these traditional sources, one might mention the liturgical music of Stravinsky, the ceremonial music of Janacek, the children's music of Orff, and Satie's Socrate. This does not mean that Part was 'influenced' by these composers, only that he shares with them a consanguinity of mind, creating, from the rudiments of mode and triad, a music that is extraordinarily simple, and simply extraordinary. Three examples of this phase of Part's creation complete this recording.
Summa was originally a setting for four voices of the Latin version of the Christian creed. The music does not attempt to illustrate or express the words: in this respect it resembles medieval music and is distinct from a Renaissance polyphonist such as byrd, even when writing liturgically.
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Festina lente, written in 1988 for string orchestra and harp, is 'out of this world' in a rather different sense. The white-note texture, without a single accidental, induces calm of mind, all passion spent: an effect compounded by the ambiguity of the modality, which is Lydian, Aeolian, or Dorian, neutrally in limbo. The title, Festina lente, bears on both the piece's technique and its meaning, for it is built on mensuration canons that 'hurry slowly' in that the theme is chanted by the violas at basic speed, and is canonically imitated by first and second violins at double speed, and by cellos and basses at half speed.
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Fratres dates from 1977, but was revised in 1983. This later version is for string orchestra, with claves and bass drum. Throughout, cellos and basses sustain a drone on the open fifth, A to E: a device common in medieval organum and in sundry oriental musics.
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These three late works are brief in temporal duration but eternal in atemporal effect. Similar principles inform the major liturgical works of Part's maturity, culminating in the St John Passion of 1982. At the end of this work Part, far from relapsing into the 'paradise of archetypes and repetition' beloved of children, savages, and minimalists, is poised on the verge between Becoming and Being, creating what is surely one of the sublime moments in 20th century music. His has indeed been a miraculous pilgrimage. (Wilfrid Mellers)

Tracklisting:

1. Collage sur B.A.C.H: I. Toccata. Preciso {2:45}

2. Collage sur B.A.C.H: II. Sarabande. Lento {3:33}

3. Collage sur B.A.C.H: III. Ricercar. Deciso {1:32}

4. Summa {4:18}

5. Wenn Bach Bienen gezüchtet hätte {7:34}

6. Fratres {10:00}

7. Symphony No. 2: I. {6:52}

8. Symphony No. 2: II. {3:06}

9. Symphony No. 2: III. {4:45}

10. Festina lente {5:53}

11. Credo {12:38}

(1) or (1) (2) or (2) [links coming back soon, (1/22/2012)]