If you love Arvo Pärt’s generally serene and string-laden orchestral music, then you’ll love this disc. Yes, there’s a certain sameness to all 73 minutes taken at once, but then only a critic would be so stupid as to attempt such a thing. None of these pieces present any special interpretive problems: they are all fairly slow, easy to play, resolutely tonal, and essentially built out of rich chords arranged in a variety of repetitive rhythmic patterns. All of them are quite lovely, especially the famous Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Fratres, Summa, and Silouan’s Song. It might be that at 15 minutes Trisagion goes on a bit long, but then the even longer Third Symphony sustains its 24 minutes effortlessly. The secret to playing this music well (and if the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra doesn’t know its Pärt then no one does) is to make it sound like it’s not being conducted at all. It should simply flow irresistibly onward at its own special pulse–but make no mistake, it should have a pulse!
Certainly Paavo Järvi understands this as well as his players, and the result wears its inherently slow tempos lightly and sonorously. Excellently balanced, warmly rounded sonics provide the perfect frame to enjoy Pärt’s meditative inspirations. There’s such a difference between a composer like Pärt, whose simplifications of style result in shapely, elegantly crafted works that truly say more with less, and a phony like John Tavener who wears his religion on his sleeve and doesn’t know when to shut up because, as they say on Madison Avenue, if you’ve got nothing important or substantive to say, then “Sing it!” The comparison is truly telling. [3/7/2003]