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Displaying records 1 through 10 of 11 |
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Price: $17.98
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Sale: $10.97
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Manufacturer: Ecm Records
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Description: Though these pieces are typical of Pärt's style, they seem less bleak than those on previous discs. The Te Deum, while often in a minor tonality and sometimes imposing, has a suitable extroverted quality; the Magnificat, with its hushed intensity, does seem solemn, but its cadences are striking, typically resolving from a tonal chord to a shimmering major-second dissonance. The Berliner Messe includes not only the Mass ordinary, but also three propers for Pentecost, and displays a range of moods from nervous penitence in the Kyrie to lively good cheer in the Credo to serenity in the Agnus Dei. Best is the sequence "Veni sancte spiritus," sung largely in unison to a haunting 6/8 melody. Tiny Estonia, Pärt's homeland, has provided him with some impressive interpreters. --Matthew Westphal
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Price: $25.98
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Sale: $17.08
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Manufacturer: Ecm Records
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Description: Arvo Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen is an unqualified masterpiece. Although he's previously written music with similar notions of harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic economy, this work successfully incorporates and develops material that in this context easily could become unwieldy. The texts are taken from the canon of repentance of the Russian Orthodox Church, a subject that has occupied the composer for many years. These songs of transformation "invoke the border between day and night ... prophecy and fulfillment, the here and the hereafter." Supervised by the composer, this performance by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir is pure gold, and likely will remain the definitive recording. Pärt's music rises from gentle valleys to impressive dramatic heights; from single voices to full choir. Here is 83 minutes of exquisite a cappella music in which time and space seem one, and rhythms find their place in a perfect synchrony with breathing and heartbeat. Whether any of this is conscious on the composer's part is incidental. Pärt is tuned into something that finds and touches us all. --David Vernier
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Price: $17.98
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Sale: $12.55
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Manufacturer: Ecm Records
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Description: You might expect that Pärt's meditative, detached style--with little distinction between consonance and dissonance, or overt emotion--wouldn't wear well through a 70-minute Passion in Latin without even a break between tracks. (Actually, there's just one.) The roles are distinguished only by scoring: the Evangelist's narration is taken by four singers and a few instruments in various combinations; Pilate is a deliberate tenor; Jesus, a cavernous bass singing very slowly. However, if you listen calmly and attentively, this work will transport you. When Jesus sings (slowly, on a simple five-note scale), "It is finished," and the Evangelist quartet intones on a single note, "And bowing his head he gave up the spirit," it's heartbreaking. The choir's huge crescendo through the final nine-word prayer is stunning. --Matthew Westphal
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Price: $17.98
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Sale: $9.81
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Manufacturer: Ecm Records
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Description: This CD features some great performances by Pärt specialists of a variety of shorter works. The clamorous Arbos for brass makes a startling opening for those who expect abstracted reverence; the lament, An den Wassern, has a startling ending that builds in intensity and volume only to break off midphrase. The static Pari Intervallo for organ leads into De Profundis, with its sense of slow but unstoppable movement (every note the same length, every measure the same rhythm). Es Sang has an unexpectedly lilting tune for solo alto, punctuated by string exclamations; Summa is a straightforward Pärt-style setting of the Credo. Arbos is repeated (this is oddly satisfying), and the disc closes with a masterpiece, the unbearably sad Stabat Mater for three voices and three strings. --Matthew Westphal
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Price: $21.98
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Sale: $13.75
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Manufacturer: Harmonia Mundi Fr.
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Description: Contemporary troubador Paul Hillier has been one of the key players behind introducing Arvo Pärt's music to Western audiences, first through recordings with the Hilliard Ensemble and later through his magnificently innovative group Theatre of Voices. I Am the True Vine continues the collaboration by bringing together some truly vintage Pärt compositions from the '90s. Although it exists on disc in a more elaborate version for choir and strings, the 1990 Berlin Mass was originally written for just four solo voices and organ. Pärt later revised the score, returning to that original sonority, which is the version offered here. The consummate preparation of the Theatre of Voices, in which every line is lovingly unfurled, the whole building into a memorable aural sculpture, only heightens a listener's admiration for Pärt's ability to make the seemingly simple profound. We also hear the composer in a more overtly joyful mood than usual in the short first selection, while the title track--a setting of a text from the Gospel of John and one of three world premiere recordings here--is a marvelously organic example of word painting (representing Pärt's choral virtuosity even when it comes to setting English text). --Thomas May
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Price: $29.95
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Sale: $6.99
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Manufacturer: Gloriae Dei Cantores
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Description: 2006 finds the world celebrating a major musical anniversary with the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Musicians and laymen alike have enjoyed the genius of Mozart through his superlative symphonies, operas, chamber and piano music. In addition, his Requiem, left incomplete at his death, remains one of the most beloved of sacred choral works. Now, Gloriae Dei Cantores presents a rare look at a side of Mozart that is not so well known: his contribution to music for the Church. While he lived and worked in Salzburg, Mozart composed numerous masses, litanies, vespers services and motets. Gloriae Dei Cantores has selected a sampling of these works for Mozart: Rare Choral Works, a celebratory musical tribute honoring Mozart’s birthday. Included in this recording are two rarely heard major works of great beauty and invention: Davide Penitente K. 469 and the Litaniae de venerabili altaris Sacramento K. 243. David Penitente draws upon the psalms of David, both penitential and joyful, and uses the music of Mozart’s Vienna Musician’s Benevolent Society. The “Litany for the Veneration of the Sacred Altar” was used in Salzburg Cathedral, possibly for the feast of Corpus Christi and contains music of great imagination and color. Also included is a further litany, several motets and two of the famous church sonatas for small orchestra and organ, all giving us a rounded picture of Mozart the sacred musician. Mozart: Rare Choral Works will be a fascinating experience for all classical music lovers as well as those interested in a lesser-known side of the great genius.
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Manufacturer: Ecm Records
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Manufacturer: Ecm Records
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Manufacturer: ECM Records
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Description: This seminal disc now almost seems like a manifesto for a whole new strain of minimalism that has found an enormously receptive audience in the last decade. It represented a breakthrough for Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose music--like that of his European colleagues John Tavener and Henryk Górecki--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 Pärt 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. The tolling of the tubular bells in Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten is an emotionally charged lament, based on a simple minor descending scale, that introduces Pärt's fascination with what he calls "tintinnabulation": the literal and metaphorical sound of ringing bells. This recording is also famous for the acoustically warm presence produced by ECM's Manfred Eicher, which magnificently captures the mystical simplicity of Pärt's sound world. --Thomas May
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Manufacturer: ECM Records
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Description: You might expect that Pärt's meditative, detached style--with little distinction between consonance and dissonance or overt emotion--wouldn't wear well through a 70-minute Passion in Latin without even a break between tracks. (There's only one.) The roles are distinguished only by scoring: the Evangelist's narration is taken by four singers and a few instruments in various combinations; Pilate is a deliberate tenor; Jesus, a cavernous bass singing very slowly. However, if you listen calmly and attentively, this work will transport you. When Jesus sings (slowly, on a simple five-note scale), "It is finished," and the Evangelist quartet intones on a single note, "And bowing his head he gave up the spirit," it's heartbreaking. The choir's huge crescendo through the final nine-word prayer is stunning. --Matthew Westphal
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Displaying records 1 through 10 of 11
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