Arvo Pärt’s rejection of serial nastiness was admirable, and he has created some stunning choral music embodying the new simplicity of his mature idiom. That said, his Fourth symphony offers half an hour of pretentious hooey. With its track listing conveniently hidden in the middle of the wholly inadequate booklet (more on this anon), Pärt rather hopefully marks the first movement “Con sublimità”, which in this case means that it sounds like the sort of stuff Alan Hovhaness and Lou Harrison were doing in the 1950s under far less pompous titles. The second movement, “Affannoso”, lives up to its designation: “labored”. The problem is, Pärt’s “labored” is hardly any different from his “sublime”, or his “deciso” finale for that matter.
Bottom line: the piece is a bore, plain and simple. It’s well played, to be sure, with a certain amount of live noise that reveals the audience to have been as restless as you probably will be. The coupling is an excerpt from the larger Kanon pokajanen previously recorded by ECM in the 1990s. Supposedly this work influenced the symphony in some way, but the presence of this 15-minute extract isn’t otherwise explained and the whole thing adds up to a scant 50 minutes of playing time that is nowhere disclosed on the disc packaging. Musically this is a non-happening, and economically it’s a rip-off. Caveat emptor!
