Arvo Pärt – Triodion
Polyphony
Stephen Layton
Choir and Organ
November 2003
International record review
November 2003
BBC Music Magazine, CD of the Month
October 2003
Classic FM Magazine, Opera and Vocal Disc of the
Month
October 2003
The Sunday Times, featured album of The Month/CD
ROM
September 2003
BBC internet, Featured album
1st September 2003
The Telegraph
20th September 2003
The Sunday Times
21st September 2003
Music Week, Album of the
Fortnight
22nd September 2003
FT Magazine – Weekend
Saturday 6 September 2003
BBC Music Magazine,
CD of the Month
Please click on the images above for larger versions.
More than any other composer alive today Arvo Pärt has given us back
the idea of eloquent beautiful simplicity. Granted, he can take his asceticism
too far – sometimes numinous purity shades over into mere plainness.
But with the exception of the creakily formulaic setting of My Hearts
in the Highlands, that’s not the case with any of the works recorded
here. Again and again there’s a sense of wonder and delight that
so much can be achieved with such modest uncomplicated means. The yo-yoing
effect as words are passed around the choir in I am the true vine could
have been irritatingly naïve. Instead it’s quite mesmerising.
A single shift of harmony in the Littlemore Tractus is like a sudden beam
of light. Dopo la Victoria manages to be reverential and dancingly light-hearted
at the same time. There’s even humour (not a quality that’s
often ascribed to Pärt) in … which was the son of.. a setting
of the interminable and rather dubious genealogy of Jesus in St Luke’s
Gospel.
Of course, a lot depends on the performances. Stephen Layton and Polyphony
seem to have found an ideal balance of intensity and dignified elegance,
of sensuousness and purity. The recordings, too could hardly be better;
a suitably spacious background acoustic, but with everything clearly in
focus. This disc deserves the widest possible success.
Stephen Johnson
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“…Back finally to CDs: one release that ought to sell by the
bucket-load (even without a £6m signing) is the new recording of
Pärt choral works by crack vocal group Polyphony under the directorship
of Stephen Layton. It’s our disc of the month, and, as Stephen Johnson
says, “Pärt has given us back the idea of eloquent, beautiful
simplicity…this disc deserves the widest possible success.’”
Harriet Smith
Editor BBC Music Magazine
October 2003
Classic FM Magazine
Opera and Vocal Disc of the Month
If one word could stand for Arvo Part’s recent choral output, it
would surely be inclusivity, not just because of the composers return
to the simple austere harmonies favoured in his early sacred pieces (although
that’s a considerable part of the deal in Triodion and Salve Regina),
but chiefly thanks to the clarity of his spiritual message. The central
section of Dopo la Victoria, a mini-cantata that was commissioned to mark
the 1600th Anniversary of Milan’s St Ambrosius, is worth a thousand
sermons on the transmission of divine knowledge, from generation to generation.
Likewise, Part’s setting of St Luke’s genealogy of Jesus in
…which was the son of, itself a triumph of musical imagination, projects
the fervour of faith with greater force than words alone. The heartfelt
conviction of these piece registers profoundly with Stephen Layton, who
draws sublime singing from Polyphony, without allowing their refined work
to overshadow Part’s religiosity. The choir’s pursuit of perfection
ideally compliments the sheer beauty of the music. I would favour a richer
sound from Polyphony’s sopranos at times, although their choirboy
like purity connects the repertoire with the age-old English collegiate
and cathedral tradition.
Andrew Stewart
October 2004
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The Sunday Times
Featured album of CD ROM – The Month 2003
Polyphony’s earlier album devoted to the a cappella choral music
of the Estonian cult composer featured pieces written between 1988 and
1991. This new release comprises works, some recorded here for the first
time, of more recent provenance (1996-2002) Of the eight pieces, two are
settings of the traditional Latin liturgy, Nunc Dimittis (2001) and Salve
Regina (2002) but we also find the “Holy minimalist” tackling
Italian, Russian and English texts. Both Triodion and the Robert Burns
setting, My hearts in the Highlands, have links with the music of Benjamin
Britten, whom Pärt has long revered. His Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin
Britten of 1977, performed the year after the English composer’s
death, is a modern classic. Layton’s superb choir respond to the
different challenges of the various choral traditions from which these
pieces derive.
Hugh Canning
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BBCi Album of the Week
There’s a quiet and cumulative power to these works, given performances
of luminous purity by Polyphony and Stephen Layton.
‘There’s a line in this disc’s title track, from an Orthodox
ode addressed to Saint Nicholas: “therewithal hast thou acquired:
by humility – greatness, by poverty – riches.” This might
have been written about Arvo Pärt’s compositional technique,
here liberated from the minimalist strictures of earlier decades, treading
a fine line between agony and ecstasy in a way unparalleled since Bach.
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s new disc of choral music conveys
a quiet and cumulative power, given performances of luminous purity by
Polyphony and Stephen Layton.’
In his earlier vein, Pärt often reached spiritual feast through the
technical famine of systemic patterning and repetition. In the music on
this new cd, all composed between 1996 and 2002 and featuring six première
recordings, Pärt instead suggests austerity through the use of a
much broader and freer palette. This is particularly palpable in the Nunc
Dimitis, where gorgeous textures, harmonies and sonorities conjure
a feeling of purity and emptiness.
Elsewhere, Pärt has a couple of surprises up his sleeve. The opening
track, Dopo lavittoria, begins in sprightly madrigalian form, entirely
appropriate to a commission from the City of Milan. It sets an Italian
text describing the conception of the Te Deum by Saints Ambrose
and Augustine, an unusually postmodern exercise for Pärt, but one
which does nothing to detract from the sincerity of the setting, suggesting
instead a celebration of the sanctifying power of centuries of worshipful
use.
The weirdest moment on the disc comes with My heart’s in the Highlands,
a setting of a burns poem which apparently has a highly personal significance
for the composer. It is one of only two tracks on the disc which recall
Pärt’s earlier, more systematic approach, giving Burn’s
wistful evocation of the bucolic North to a monotone counter-tenor over
a strictly controlled organ accompaniment, and making the text suddenly
sound like a mystical allegory of longing for the divine.
There is a little of the balletic brilliance that Pärt displayed
in such works as the Stabat Mater or Tabula Rasa, and mercifully
and as little of the thunderous severity of his Passio mode. Instead
there's a quiet and cumulative power of these works, given performances
of luminous purity by Polyphony and Stephen Layton. By the time we arrive
at the Salve Regina, a kind of penitential cradle song which closes
the disc, we’re ready to fall at the feet of the Maker and beg for
forgiveness, simultaneously harrowed and consoled.
Matthew Shorter
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Music Week Album of the Fortnight
With six world premiere recordings to its credit, this disc would immediately
attract attention even if the performances were not of the exceptional
quality that they are here. Harmonic simplicity and the clear delivery
of words are Part’s concerns in these works, united to haunting effect
in the album’s solemn title track, Triodion. Stephen Layton and Polyphony
clearly captured the Estonian composer’s heart at London’s Temple
Church this January. Classic FM and Radio Three’s CD Review have
already got behind this album, which is promoted as Hyperion’s record
of the month.
Adam Woods
22 September 2003
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FT Magazine – Weekend
Arvo Pärt: Triodion
Polyphony/Stephen Layton
Hyperion
Triodion is the longest of eight works on this disc, and comprises three
odes leading to a simple coda. Everything is pared down to the minimum
here and the music always seems to have time to linger. Only the most
pure and precise of choral groups can raise Arvo Part’s work to its
optimum level of expression. Polyphony and its conductor Stephen Layton
make ideal interpreters. This their second disc devoted to Part, focusing
on works since 1996, shows that his numinous music has lost nothing of
its hypnotic power.
Richard Fairman
Saturday 6 September 2003
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International Record Review
Arvo Pärt: Triodion
Polyphony/Stephen Layton
Hyperion
I anticipate a considerable success for this disc. It brings together
eight quite recent works by Pärt, and in doing so calls attention
to the considerable variety to be found in them, to which Meurig Bowen’s
informed notes provide an excellent guide. Dopo la vittoria brings the
first surprise: it’s a setting of a text in Italian (though admittedly,
translated from the Russian of the Dictionary History of Church Singers
and Chants by Metropolitan Filaret, published in St Petersburg in 1902)
dealing in celebratory fashion with the baptism of St Augustine by St
Ambrose and alternating the composer’s more recent rapid, declamatory
style with a kind of elongated tintinnabuli writing: once can definitely
hear that it’s by Pärt, but the experience of writing in Italian
has, as is natural, apparently released something else, some other aspect
of the composer’s style. It’s an intriguing piece with many
moments of intense beauty.
Even more unexpected are the settings of words by Burns and Cardinal Newman.
The latter (Littlemore Tractus, which begins ‘May He support us all
the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes …’)
comes from a Newman sermon, and has overtones of both Pärt’s
earlier works for organ and English late-Medieval music. My Heart’s
in the Highlands is a curiosity, using an extremely restricted palette,
for a solo countertenor and organ. For me it doesn’t really work,
sounding, as it does, just too austere, but I can imagine it being very
effective live. Salve Regina returns us to the Latin liturgy, in another
memorable, richly scored setting.
More in the classical Pärt idiom are the Nunc dimittis and Triodion.
Both are gentle, meditatively luminous works, though the latter is conceived
on a much broader canvas. It has already been recorded once, by the choir
which commissioned it, Lancing College; good though that recording is,
Polyphony’s suave blend and sense of long-range direction is hard
to beat. Recent recordings, under the direction of Paul Hillier, are also
available of both … which was the Son of … and I am the true
vine: these are also pleasing, however (and they are very appealing),
it must be said that the rich, chocolate consistency of Polyphony’s
sound knocks them into a cocked hat.
And speaking of hats, I take off my own, to Pärt, Polyphony and Hyperion
for this, a dazzling recording of such extraordinary music.
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The
Telegraph
Arvo Pärt: Triodion
Polyphony/Stephen Layton
Hyperion
This collection, a sequel to Polyphony’s all-Pärt CD for Hyperion,
brings together choral music composed from 1996 to 2002. The period marked
a widening of the range of languages Pärt set, and also a warming
of his tonal colouring, compared with the cooler, sparer sound-world of
his classic Latin settings, such as the St John Passion.
Several of the works were British ecclesiastical commissions and the English
language predominates, with the disc centring on Triodion, a setting of
three odes written for Lancing School in Sussex.
There is a setting of words by John Henry Newman (Littlemore Tractus),
a rather precious response to Robert Burn’s My heart’s in the
Highlands for countertenor and organ, and two biblical pieces with English
texts, I am the True Vine and … which was the Son of …, Pärt’s
setting of a text made for “holy minimalist” such as he is,
the geneology of Christ. There is also music to Italian and Latin words,
Dopo la vittoria, on the baptism of St Augustine, a radian Nunc demittis
and, to end, a warmly responsive Salve regina.
The singing on the disc is little short of stunning: Polyphony’s
sense of ensemble is second to none, and conductor Stephen Layton paces
these works with an unerring sense of Pärt’s instinctive feeling
for space and texture.
The recording, in London’s Temple Church, adds a luminous aura of
its own (though the organ gives a hum of air when it features), contributing
to a deeply satisfying listening experience.
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The
Sunday Times
Arvo
Pärt: Triodion
Polyphony/Stephen Layton
Hyperion
Polyphony gave meticulous performances of eight surprisingly varied works,
all written since 1996. The opening Dopo la Vittoria has a madrigalian
freedom, while I am the True Vine, Pärt opts for a Tavener-like simplicity.
In each of the Triodion’s three odes, he builds to a climax, only
to close with a ritual supplication where harmonic movement stops and
contemplative silences play their part. Perhaps the most powerful piece
is the haunting Burns setting for countertenor and organ, My Heart‘s
in the Highlands, beautifully performed by David James and Christopher
Bowers-Broadbent.
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Nov 2003
Polyphony / Stephen Layton (dir)
Hyperion CDA66960
I had never been to Venice before this summer, and the relentless beauty
of the place overwhelmed me. This new CD, too, is relentlessly beautiful:
just as one palazzo follows another on the Grand Canal, so here one polished
gem succeeds another in performances of an intensity that raises the hair
on the nape of the neck. I haven't heard a choral recording to beat it
in years.
Stephen Layton and Polyphony have recorded Part for Hyperion before, concentrating
on music written in 1988-91: the Berliner Messe, The Beatitudes (his first
setting of a text in English), Annum per annum for organ, Magnificat,
Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen and De Profundis. Those relatively well known
pieces had attracted the attention of a number of other choirs on CD.
On this new disc, by contrast, six of the eight works, most of them a
cappella, receive their first recordings and show Part's harmonic idiom
expanding beyond the restrictive, triadic 'tintinnabulist' style that
characterised the works from the mid-1970s onwards that marked his escape
from the creative impasse that had been troubling him.
Dopo la vittoria was commissioned to celebrate the 1,600th anniversary
of the death of St Ambrose, who is supposed to have written the text of
the Te Deum. Part, who had already written a Te Deum in 1984-85, initially
thought he would have to write another. But by chance he found, and had
translated into Italian, a Russian account from 1902 of Ambrose's baptism
of St Augustine, who joined with Ambrose in the antiphonal singing of
the Te Deum (all this is explained in Meurig Bowen's excellent notes).
Part's music takes its cue from this story, with the opening line hocketing
cheerfully between registers before opening out for a rich, chordal intonation
of the words 'Te Deum'. The text conditions the further sectional contrasts
which end in grandly ringing chords of 'Amen' before the jolly opening
phrases come dancing back. The Nunc dimittis of 1989, though, is conceived
as a single span: it rises slowly from a pianissimo opening to a series
of searingly passionate chords, the word 'lumen' sparking a sunburst from
the choir which sinks down again, and an exchange of 'Amens' rocks between
the voices like a lullaby. Polyphony sang these works last year in a concert
in Temple Church, London (where the recording was made in January this
year), and the work which astonished me most on that occasion was... which
was the Son of..., composed in 2000. I don't know of another composer
who noticed before Part that the passage from St Luke (3: 23-38) tracing
Jesus's ancestry back to Adam and thus to God is an obvious candidate
for musical treatment. Meurig Bowen surmises that 'to some composers,
indeed, this long list of names might seem no more enticing to set than
the proverbial telephone directory'. But that's the whole point, as Bowen
soon concedes: the ritual stability of the text allows Part to play with
an entire arsenal of harmonies, some of them resolving with gratifying
predictability, others heading in directions that still surprise even
after the music has become familiar. And the whole thing swings with the
upbeat rhythmic enthusiasm and confident humour of a revivalist hymn.
The expansive I am the true vine, a 1996 setting of John 15: 1-14 composed
for the 900th anniversary of the founding of Norwich Cathedral, is calmly
contemplative; what keeps the ear on the qui vive is a constant shifting
of the register in the course of the line: a line from the basses suddenly
shoots up to the high trebles or plunges in the opposite direction, with
rhythmic variety set between pedal points at either end of the texture
- Part paints a vine on the page, although the idea is disguised by the
exquisite loveliness of its sonic realisation.
The Littlemore Tractus of 2001 sets part of an 1843 sermon by John Henry
(later Cardinal) Newman and marks his centenary. It could hardly be less
like Newman's better known musical monument, The Dream of Gerontius (which,
apparently, Part doesn't know): a rocking figure in the organ, played
here by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, underpins unhurried choral homophony.
Triodion, another commission (in 1998, for the 150th anniversary of the
foundation of Lancing College), sets three odes from the Orthodox Prayer
Book. The music is spare and solemn, the text intoned with hieratic intensity
as each ode rises to, and recedes from, a climax, followed by hesitant
pp imprecation.
Textural contrast comes with a setting of Burns's My Heart's in the Highlands,
written in 2000 'as a small present for my beloved David James' of the
Hilliard Ensemble, who sings it here to organ accompaniment. Compared
to the catchy romantic Schwung of Schumann's setting ('Hochlanders Abschied',
no.13 of Myrthen, Op.25), Part's is severe indeed - Bowen points out that
the organ part 'is strictly "tintinnabulist", with its stepwise
bass and triadic upper line'; the vocal line is likewise confined to an
F minor triad.
The closing Salve Regina, for chorus and organ, marked the 1,150th anniversary
of the city of Essen in 2002. It is another arch shape, building like
a slowly expanding hymn to a powerful climax. It is less individual than
the other works here and does suggest a degree of automaticism on Part's
part - which doesn't stop it being attractive.
The inside front cover of the booklet bears a picture of Part in a set
of headphones, with a broad grin on his face and his hands open before
him as if to indicate: 'I can hardly believe it'. As well he might not
- it's a well nigh faultless production. I noticed one slightly hesitant
entry from the tenors (in the Littlemore Tractus) and that was about all.
Intonation, balance, rhythm - it's all perfect. The recording is of demonstration
quality, too. This is something special.
Martin Anderson
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