Stabat Mater

Sacred texts, no matter how ancient, never cease to be “contemporary” to Arvo Pärt. His setting of the 13th-century Latin Stabat Mater hymn uses music of the utmost simplicity to convey the feelings of desolation and despair experienced by Christ’s mother at the foot of the Cross. Mary’s pain leaps across two millennia to pierce the listener’s heart like an ice pick, all the more telling for the emotional restraint and sustained intensity of Pärt’s composition. The work’s essence is contained within the descending scale and the stripped-back harmonies it implies, presented at first by solo violin, viola and cello and taken up seamlessly by a vocal trio of soprano, alto (or countertenor) and tenor. These basic elements of melody and harmony, enlivened occasionally by rhythmic riffs from the strings, belong to the bell-like sonorities of the composer’s tintinnabuli style, established and tested for nearly a decade by the time he wrote Stabat Mater in 1985. The first recording of the original version, made for ECM Records by the Hilliard Ensemble with Gidon Kremer, Nobuko Imai and David Geringas, is blessed with a rare mystical intensity, as if its performers were taking part in a ritual of private devotion to the Holy Mother. Pärt returned to the score in 2008 to make a fresh arrangement for three-part mixed choir and string orchestra. The outcome, recorded by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and RIAS Chamber Choir under Kristjan Järvi, preserves the serene austerity of the original while serving to magnify the work’s expression of unconditional love and compassion.