DiscountDelight - Alina - Arvo Part
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List Price: $17.98
Our Price: $13.19
Your Save: $ 4.79 ( 27% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Ecm Records
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0028944995824
Label: Ecm Records
Manufacturer: Ecm Records
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Ecm Records
Release Date: 2000-02-01
Studio: Ecm Records
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Fǖr Alina, a love song.
Comment:
You sit in a darkened room looking into a garden. There is no moon.
A single disembodied note sounds, and in the ambient light you see a piano. There is a repeated triad that you think is the opening of Moonlight Sonata, but it's not. It is a simple right-handed exercise, lovely in its repetition, a practiced, careful rhythm.
From a shadow in the drapes, a violin begins a pair of notes, one simple bow stroke, down and up, listening, enjoying its resonance, perfecting its tone.
As if they were unaware of each other, piano and violin continue with parts accidentally overlaid. Long slow notes by the violin are a wistful melody, the finger exercise a cautious metronome.
This is crushingly intimate music. We have stumbled into a sacred moment. When the left hand strikes a lower key, it is as if a third musician has entered the room and with a simple, ominous single note, has taken the percussive role from the right hand. But the right continues and our attention is drawn again to its simple melody. There is that repeating triad. The cycle begins again.
This is Fǖr Alina. It is so lovely, so innocent and so unspoilt, we can only cry upon first hearing. It is unimaginable Pưrt did not intend Fǖr Alina to be compared with Fǖr Elise. With this CD, Fǖr Alina, like other elegant simplistes, is poised to be trivialized. Mark my words, the day will come, and soon, when some barbarian will use it in a ring tone. But this is strong music, strong enough to outlast mere popularity. One day it will make you cry again.
Still, I sort of hope no one will buy it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: So tragically beautiful.
Comment: I had purchased this CD for the track Alina - my sister's name is Alina and I was looking at learning this piece. What beauty. It's in this music, not the passion of Chopin or the violence of Prokofiev, that I can express my inner torment, my personal struggles.
As for the Spiegel, for some reason when I listen to the violin on the first track, I cry. Every time. Sometimes uncontrollably. I can't describe the effect this music has on me - that wierd feeling of satisfaction and regret at the same time. When I hear that soaring piano accompaniment and the rising violin, I can reminisce back on my life, good times and bad. It's absolutely sublime.
Life can be wonderful and simple, and this music demonstrates exactly that.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: I think I like it.
Comment: I think I like it. Well I like it- but it's hard to get way into this one. In one way it 'takes one away' and in another way- it doesn't go far enough in that regard. So you are stuck about 2/3 the way there. Know what I mean?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Music from God
Comment: I am listening as I write to this impossible, miraculous, tender, joyful, sorrowful music. I love all kinds of music, but I also know when I'm in the presence of truly great music, and this is it. This is music which reaches deep inside you and touches you where are most vulnerable, most authentic, most alive. To me it speaks of what is imperishable in the human soul, in spite of all the cruelties and vicissitudes of life, and of the love of God, which embraces and suffers with all God's creatures. It is alive with faith and speaks that faith to me. Arvo Pưrt must be one of the great souls of the age to be able to create art of this stature.
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the most beautiful pieces of music I own
Comment: Even though I've told myself over and over again that I'm going to try to stop worrying about things so much, I always manage to find something to think about and either cause some sort of stress or sadness in my life. It's certainly easy enough to feel this way on a regular basis simply by picking up a newspaper and reading it or by turning on the television and watching some news coverage, but there are some days when things seem to have gotten so acute that even interpersonal slights that I see happen around me seem to affect me in little ways.
Now that I've gone off and sounded like a complete sad sack or an overly sensitive type, I suppose I should say that even when I feel like the above, there are only a couple musical solutions I can use in combatting the mood. One way is to simply bludgeon the feeling into submission with some sort of upbeat and/or loud style of music, which usually leads me to simply forget about the issues at hand and move onto something else. There are other times, though, when I'm looking for a piece of music that actually contains some of those aching feelings as well as a little bit of hope, and for those times, one of my favorite pieces of music is Alina by Arvo Pưrt.
Pưrt has been composing music for some time now, and has completed many huge works for orchestra and/or choirs (my favorites of those works being either Kanon Pokajanen or Te Deum), but in addition to that work has also composed many pieces for smaller bodies of instrumentation. Alina is one of those pieces, and yet it is the work of his that I find myself returning to the most. It's sparse, and some would even say simple, but it's personal and human and at times nearly devastating.
The release is actually comprised of only two pieces, with two variations of one, and three of the other. "Spiegel Im Spiegel" bookends the release, as well as providing the centerpiece. The opening and closing interpretations both feature only piano and violin, with the strings providing clean, subtle tonal backdrops while the piano plays repeated phrases that move back and forth between major and minor keys. The middle performance of the track finds the violin switching to violincello, providing just a slightly deeper and more rich backdrop for the piano, and the effect is barely noticible but effective.
The other two tracks are "Fưr Alina," and are comprised of stark piano, which shifts subtley in tempo and rhythm and are so pure that they feel like they're being written as they're played, like some sort of sad lament that struggles ever so slightly to find the right words, but because of the short pauses feels even more potent once the emotion is finally poured out. On the release, the five tracks run just over fifty minutes, and even though several of the pieces are different variations on one another, it's one of those recordings that simply seeps into your being. One of the more touching pieces of music I've ever heard.
(from almost cool music reviews)
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Editorial Reviews:
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Arvo Pärt's Alina follows a simple-enough formula. Two stark instrumental works from the master of holy minimalism repeat each other, each time slightly different. But the blissful results--quiet, haunting, and thoroughly hypnotizing--meld to create one of classical music's best albums of 2000. It's as intense and sublime as contemporary classical music can be. --Jason Verlinde
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