Composer: Arvo Pärt
Performer: The Tallis Scholars
Conductor: Peter Phillips
Audio CD
Number of Discs: 1
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Gimell
Release: 2015
Size: 0.99 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen
01. O Weisheit
02. O Adonai
03. O Spross aus Isais Wurzel
04. O Schlüssel Davids
05. O Morgenstern
06. O König aller Völker
07. O Immanuel
08. Magnificat
09. Which Was the Son of …
Nunc dimittis
10. Nunc dimittis
11. Quia viderunt oculi mei
12. Gloria
The Woman with the Alabaster Box
13. Now when Jesus was in Bethany
14. Why trouble ye the woman?
15. Verily I say unto you
Tribute to Caesar
16. Then went the Pharisees
17. And they brought unto him a penny
18. I Am the True Vine
Triodion
19. Introduction In the name of the Father
20. Ode I We do homage
21. Ode II Unto the Birth-giver of God
22. Ode III A rule of faith
23. Coda Glory to the Father
“It is with great pleasure that we present our tribute to Arvo Pärt in his 80th year. Tintinnabuli (from the Latin for ‘bell’) is the compositional style created by Arvo Pärt which informs every work on this recording. In all my searchings for inspiring contemporary music I have not come across anyone to rival him
In singing the motets of Arvo Pärt with so much eloquence, the Tallis Scholars put them on a par with the masterpieces of the renaissance. With this programme for unaccompanied choir the Tallis Scholars pay homage to Arvo Pärt on his 80th birthday. To realise this Peter Phillips and his singers have put together, under the title of Tintinnabuli – the word used to describe music inspired by the ringing of bells – eight motets dating from the 1990s.
For some time now this celebrated choir has been in the habit of adding one or two of these pieces to their polyphonic renaissance programmes, ‘ever more convinced’, as Peter Phillips says in his excellent notes to the disc, ‘that Pärt’s music provides a new and important perspective to the work of the renaissance masters’. And indeed in their concerts, as well as on this disc, the Tallis Scholars sing Pärt as they sing renaissance music – with two voices on each vocal line.
This is extremely eloquent: their precision, clarity and lightness of texture serves the contemporary writing of the Estonian just as well as it serves that of Tallis or Palestrina. Rarely has the radical simplicity of Pärt’s music – its unadorned, diatonic harmony – been so effectively captured. By using reduced forces, and by placing the microphone near the singers, the perfect blend of the Tallis Scholars has resulted in performances which ideally complement the more usual way of recording this music, as represented by Tonu Kaljuste (Erato and ECM), who is more ‘choral’ and dramatic in his approach. And this disc supplants those of Paul Hillier on Harmonia Mundi, which introduced us to these pieces in the first place. In the meantime some of them have become classics, like the Magnificat or Which was the Son of…