CD ECM Records Arvo Part: Lamentate

2005
Alexei Lubimov - pian
The Hilliard Ensemble :
Sarah Leonard - soprana
David James - contratenor
Rogers Covey-Crump - tenor
Stephen Harrold - tenor
Gordon Jones - baritone
SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Andrey Boreyko - dirijor

Written for large orchestra and solo piano, and commissioned for a series of live events at Tate Modern, “Lamentate” was inspired by Pärt’s encounter with the enormous sculpture “Marsyas”, by Bombay-born artist Anish Kapoor. 150 metres long, “Marsyas” filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for a year. Named for the Greek satyr flayed alive by the god Apollo, the piece consists of three enormous steel rings joined by a single span of dark red PVC membrane. The colour was intended by the artist to suggest blood and the body, and the sculpture dwarfed the viewer, too large to be viewed in its entirety from any single position: “I wanted to make body into sky”, says Kapoor.

For Arvo Pärt the dimensions of the work were breathtaking: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead – as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. ... In this moment I had a strong sense of not being ready to die. And I was moved to ask myself just what I could still manage to accomplish in the time left to me.”

“Lamentate” then, is a lament not for the dead, but for the living, who must struggle “with the pain and hopelessness of this world.” The solo piano role is designated by the composer to represent “one”, the individual, buffeted by fate. It can be viewed, he writes, “as a first person narrative”. Pärt: “The work is marked by diametrically opposed moods... Exaggerating slightly, I would characterize these poles as ‘brutal-overwhelming’ and ‘intimate-fragile’.”

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Is the Estonian master moving in a new direction in his seventies? He seems to be telling us as much in Lamentate. Yes, you'll hear some of the multi-layered string sonorities and meditative qualities that have become so familiar in Pärt's patented 'ancient-invades-modern' scores, and yet there's a new sense of dramatic power, and a dynamic scale and impatient urgency of communication that's compelling.

Pärt was looking at Anish Kapoor's immense sculpture 'Marsyas', named after the Greek satyr who was flayed alive after losing a musical contest with Apollo. Pärt felt as though he was looking at his own dead body, and had a strong sense that he was not yet ready to die...so what could he achieve in the time he had left to live?

On this evidence, a great deal. 'Lamentate' is a lament not for the dead but the living, struggling with the pain and hopelessness of the world. After a subterranean rumble, a sorrowful fanfare makes way for an ascent of the solo piano keyboard, and a shuddering orchestral climax that sets the tolling of alarm bells against a Mahlerian funeral march. After the work that precedes it (the Hilliard Ensemble's performance of 'Da pacem Domine', a gently rocking prayer for peace) the effect is doubly shattering. Impressive performances, a seductive ECM recording, and works that no-one with an interest in contemporary art and music can afford to miss.
[BBC Music ]