DiscountDelight - Tabula Rasa
|
List Price: $17.98
Our Price: $12.93
Your Save: $ 5.05 ( 28% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Ecm Records
|
Average Customer Rating: 
|
|
Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0042281776427
Label: Ecm Records
Manufacturer: Ecm Records
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Ecm Records
Release Date: 1999-11-16
Studio: Ecm Records
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: should be accepted by any rational person as strong evidence for God's existence.
Comment: arguably, it was THIS music by THIS composer that Manfred Eicher's label, ECM, was meant for. If an album was released on ECM, no doubt it sounds lovely, but when purpose is paired so perfectly with sound, even ECM attains something angelic and beyond. Arvo Part's non-modulating approach to harmony, great care and attention with so few notes, and the reverent spirit that carries through his efforts encompasses a catalogue of works so great and beautiful I'm not sure any 20th century composer can remotely compare.
This ECM disc is possibly the best of all. _Tabula Rasa_, first and foremost, is a masterpiece. A violin concerto of sorts, it flows through static haze and torrid whorls, with ghostly sounds of strings punctuated by the bell- and chime-like intonations on sounds of prepared piano. Divine and without momentum, this piece forever hovers between being and nothing. _Fratres_, performed in two versions here (for violin and piano, and for 12 cellos), features a chorale-like figure recurring over an ethereal drone. Radiant and simple, not a sound is out of place. the _Cantus_ is based on rich chords arranged in a variety of rhythmic patterns, so beautiful one kind of wishes it would last longer.
this is an excellent introduction to one of the best composers of the 20th century. i would really encourage you to hear this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fill in your blank slate with some innovative music...
Comment: This CD started it all. In 1984 it introduced the then little known Arvo Pärt to a new western audience. Pärt had long before made his "tinntinnabulation" discovery (around 1976). Before this pivotal epiphany, the majority of Pärt's work fell into the serialist category. His early work shows all of the grinding atonal experimentation of the 1950s. It thus lies in stark contrast to his later work as presented on this CD (he shares this same evolutionary path with the Polish composer Górecki).
"Tabula Rasa" introduced a new music and a new style to the west. This music doesn't follow traditional harmonic or melodic forms. Listening to Pärt differs from listening to Sibelius or Stravinski. In Pärt, environment and setting are everything. The melodies and harmonies function to set a mood rather than to follow a path or a harmonic progression leading to an ultimate resolution. Subsequently, one experiences rather than listens to Pärt's work. The notes merely provide the structure. In this way Pärt's pieces represent frameworks for music (which probably explains, as related in the CD booklet, why the members of one orchestra asked "where is the music" upon seeing the score for "Tabula Rasa"). So Pärt not only presents beautiful and moving music but also helps listeners conceive of it in new ways.
The tracks on this CD provide the perfect showcase for Pärt's work. Beginners should start here. Two versions of the meditative "Fratres" appear, but each utilize such different arrangements that they sound like two separate works. "Cantus" remains one of Pärt's most moving compositions. It sounds like a slowly exploding wall of catharsis. The nearly half hour "Tabula Rasa" features incredible violin work and prepared piano (a la Cage). Overall, the mood of each piece on this CD veers strongly toward the meditative, mystical, and ethereal. As such it serves as a great introduction to the "late" Pärt and as a showcase of incredible musicianship.
Pärt remains more of a phenomenon on CD than in the concert hall. The lush rich sound of this CD, which will have your cochleas swimming, provides some evidence as to why. Not only that, the amount of quietude and silence utilized by Pärt must create difficulties for orchestra hall performance. Pärt's music, intimate and close, probably plays best in seclusion or in small venues. For the maximum experience, put on some headphones and listen to this CD. In this way listeners can experience all the subtle harmonics and nuances that make up the music of Arvo Pärt.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Modern classical music that is beautiful
Comment: Too many modern classical composers have sacrificed beauty for virtuosity and expermintality. Not so Part. This Baltic composer writes melodic music of outstanding lyricism and profound beauty. He has succesfully managed to write in the classical format while not sounding like a repetition of the great artists of yore. The music is melancolic, but not tragic, pensive but not unpenetratable. I had the great honour to listen to a live perfomance of works by Part by the Hilliard Ensamble at the Royal Festival Hall in London, UK. It was one of the few times I know of that the audience gave a standing ovation, and just did not want to stop. Mr Part was present and he almost started crying.
Part has contributed music to films as diverse as Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and Fahrenheit 9/11.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A spiritual experience
Comment: In the CD's booklet, Part is quoted as having a discussion with a monk, one of the "fratres" of the twin pieces on this CD, in which he tells the monk that, as his contribution to the world, he writes prayers and sets psalms to music. The monk tells him, "No, you are wrong. All the prayers have already been written. Now you have to prepare yourself."
After "Credo" in 1968 - which his Soviet masters banned - Part descended into a period of silence, but arose, newly-prepared, in 1976 with "Fur Alina" and the pieces that make up this CD. Now he had hit upon a new style, the "little bells" sound which he calls "tintinnabulation".
I do not know what drew Part to this minimalist and religious sound, but I can picture a grievously wounded mankind crawling out from the wars of the first half of the 20th century, enchained in the moral and substantial poverty of totalitarianism in Part's homeland, a Baltic former "captive nation". What music befits this humanity, who cannot dance, can barely move - with luck, can take a few tiny, quiet steps toward hope? This is the music. However, the Christian Part does not believe that we must all suffer to be redeemed. He says that "the Apostles [could] have lived in the Soviet Union... But it is not absolutely necessary for people to live under such conditions. Perhaps it is more important for something to happen within us." He took the monk's advice to heart.
Thus "Alina", and also this "Tabula Rasa" collection: something happened within Arvo Part, and, through the medium of the extraordinary musicians here, an echo of that reaches the listener. This is first of all spiritual music.
Gidon Kremer, Part's fellow Balt and an incredible player, has a visceral grasp of Part's work - in fact, Part says that Kremer suggested the form of Tabula Rasa to him. To have Kremer share one version of "Fratres" with Keith Jarrett on piano is ... well, not to be missed. Jarrett is a musician whose own feeling comes across in his playing, as Part's comes through his composing. Putting Jarrett to work on this CD is an example of ECM's interest in the creativity they can breed by mixing their artists.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What music should sound like.
Comment: This recording has tremendous presence. Kremer's screeching harmonic tones and pizzicato are fresh, raw and beautiful - and together with Jarrett's majestic-texturing of keys, Part's Tabula Rasa soars to euphoric heights - and plummets to exquisite melancholic depths. Other highly skilled and competent musicians have performed this piece, but not with the depth achieved in this recording by Kremer and Jarrett. In my opinion, this is what music should sound like.
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
This seminal disc now almost seems like the manifesto for a whole new strain of minimalism that has found an enormously receptive audience. 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
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
