Arvo Pärt’s “Alina” for first on vinyl 💫

 

Thanking ECM for this personal fave of mine!

The contents of Alina, two different solo piano renderings of Für Alina, and three of the captivating strings and piano duet, Spiegel im Spiegel, were culled from a significantly larger body of recordings made when Pärt and Manfred Eicher convened at Frankfurt's Festeburgkirche with the album's four contributing musicians: the violinist Vladimir Spivakov, the cellist Dietmar Schwalke, and the pianists Alexander Malter and Sergej Bezrodny. Beginning with a rendering of Spiegel im Spiegel that clocks in at just over ten and half minutes, featuring Bezrodny and Spivakov (who commissioned the work), the ear is immediately immersed in the form of minimalism for which Pärt has become most famed, balancing an incredible state of emotiveness and meditativeness that distills sonority to its most necessary and elemental, as the piano's notes slowly fall like drops of water and the violin delivers gliding tones imbued with an ecstatic sense of sorrow and loss. This is followed by the first rendering, by Alexander Malter, of Pärt's breakthrough solo-piano work Für Alina. "Jettisoning everything except the essential, it has no fixed metre or tempo", but rather calls for a "calm, exalted" feeling and "listening to one's inner self" in the performance notes of the score, leading the composer, pianist, and producer to search for distinct ways of inflecting its melody, paying meticulous attention to phrasing and dynamics and to the surrounding silence in the Frankfurt church, that resulted in its stunning first rendering that allowed each note to hang powerfully in the air and carefully respond to the next.

In many ways, while the first encountered renderings of Für Alina and Spiegel im Spiegel are definitive and could more than satiate any listeners, it is their companions, alternate performance of both pieces by Alexander Malter (Für Alina) and the cellist Dietmar Schwalke and Alexander Malter (Spiegel im Spiegel) that truly make the record what it is, drawing out subtle differences in their open potential for interpretation, particularly with regard to emotion and delivery, and thus illuminating how dynamic Pärt's deceptively simple compositions actually are. In every passing moment, these respective performances are equally impactful as their predecessors, while complimenting them in unexpected ways, becoming almost mantra-like, over the course of the album, through their repetition and variation. As Hermann Conen puts it in the companion liner notes, the album finds its form by "concentrating on an indispensable core of material."

A truly remarkable accomplishment on every possible set of terms, at long last two of the most celebrated works by Arvo Pärt appear on vinyl for the very first time, via the always amazing ECM, their original home. Beautifully produced and pressed, housed in cardboard single sleeve that perfectly reproduces the original CD issue, accompanied by a four-page insert with liner notes by Hermann Conen, this is quite simply one of the most important records to appear in the last thirty years within the field of contemporary chamber music and can not be missed.

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