Arvo Pärt – Creator Spiritus

This recording focuses on Pärt as a composer of chamber music, if we include in that category a few pieces for chamber choir. Although the music is drawn from different periods in the composer’s career, there is nonetheless a concentration of relatively new pieces, so that this CD also constitutes a brief survey of Pärt’s most recent a cappella choral work.

The Stabat Mater is one of Pärt’s chief works (in any genre) and would be more often performed if it did not call for the rather unusual mixture of three singers and string trio – unusual not in the musical sense so much as the logistic! This work was in fact the starting point of a concert program that led us in turn to this recording, and explains the presence of other works for string quartet, alone or with voices. From my work in Estonia I knew the excellence of the NYYD players and their special understanding of Pärt’s music – that it requires both intense feeling under a surface of stillness and the ability to emerge suddenly into almost violent declamation. Together with my Theatre of Voices we put together a recital of Pärt and early music. Meanwhile, with Ars Nova Copenhagen, I continued to perform a wide range of Pärt’s music, from the Passio, Te Deum, and Miserere, through to the new items presented here. The timbres of strings and of voices remain for me a core element of Pärt’s music – because each can be so perfectly blended into a single sonority – and this has encouraged the juxtaposition of the liturgical atmosphere of his choral writing with the quasi-secular colour of the string quartet. In this world an organ even becomes a domestic instrument accompanying a ballad by Robert Burns.