Arvo Pärt: Fratres... Through a Glass Darkly - Sequence by Manfred Eicher

Arvo Pärt’s music gained a global following thanks to Manfred Eicher and ECM Records. In 1984, the German record producer broadened his label’s scope by launching ECM New Series with Tabula rasa, its first Pärt album. In that age of Cold War tension, marked in the West by rampant consumerism and the genuine threat of nuclear apocalypse, the austere simplicity and emotional honesty of the Estonian composer’s art struck a chord. Since then, ECM New Series has taken care of the premiere recordings of Pärt’s major works. The creative partnership between composer and producer, backed by performers such as Gidon Kremer, the Hilliard Ensemble, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, and conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, grew from the moment in the early 1980s when Eicher heard Pärt’s music for the first time. “The encounter was unexpected and formative,” he tells Apple Music Classical. “The luminous soundscape, with its gesture of quietude, was unique and unheard-of, and awakened in me the desire to meet the composer and record his music. The album Tabula Rasa, soon to follow, and with it the founding of the New Series, became one of the decisive crossroads in ECM’s history. Decades have passed since then, our bond deepening with each return to the music.” Arvo Pärt: Fratres… Through a Glass Darkly – A Sequence by Manfred Eicher offers three remastered recordings in honor of the composer’s 90th birthday. It stands above all as a personal expression of gratitude. “The experience of listening with Arvo, of following the sounds and capturing them, has repeatedly been one of the most outstanding experiences for me,” notes Eicher. “The music that can arise in this way is music of innermost calm, requiring the highest concentration from everyone involved.” That depth of concentration can be heard in the intakes of breath, the literal inspiration, from the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra’s string players in Psalom, the shortest of the album’s trilogy of works, and again in the divine stillness that pervades the opening of Litany, like a solitary prayer piercing the silence of a dark chapel. “The works collected here are a personal selection, reflecting various stages of our journey: the Liederhalle in Stuttgart, where we recorded Psalom with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra and Saulius Sondeckis, who were also present on Tabula Rasa; the studio in Basel, where Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett first met to record Fratres; the Niguliste Church in Tallinn for Litany, a place Arvo and I often returned to, attentive to the way the music resounded amid old stones in holy spaces.” Eicher’s Sequence reflects on life’s tribulations as well as its triumphs, the natural ups and downs of being human. “The piece Mein Weg, which Pärt and I recorded years after Litany in the same place,” he recalls, “is based on the following poem from Edmond Jabès’ Book of Questions: My path has long hours,/ jolts and pains,/ My path has peaks and sea-troughs,/ sand and sky,/ Mine or thine.” Those “peaks and sea-troughs” are woven into the very fabric of Fratres, and picked out by Kremer and Jarrett in ECM’s seminal recording of the piece with a selfless sincerity that speaks for the entirety of Pärt’s music.