Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà - Arvo Pärt: Portrait (2010/2019) [Hi-Res]

Following a highly successful venture in Philip Glass' soundscape, Angèle Dubeau now goes on the trail of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Frequently referred to as meditative, Pärt prefers to describe his music as a light going through a prism, every listener perceiving it in a different way. Angèle Dubeau is revisiting Tabula rasa, Spiegel im Spiegel and Pilgrim's Song. An essential album for this era when nothing seems to be stoppable.

Following a highly successful venture in Philip Glass‘ soundscape, Angèle Dubeau now goes on the trail of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Frequently referred to as meditative, Pärt prefers to describe his music as a light going through a prism, every listener perceiving it in a different way. Angèle Dubeau is revisiting Tabula rasa, Spiegel im Spiegel and Pilgrim’s Song. An essential album for this era when nothing seems to be stoppable.

I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener. (Arvo Pärt)

For 30 years, specialists have deconstructed the music of Arvo Pärt in their efforts to grasp the subtleties of his musical language. Likely troubled by the almost instant sense of calm his work evokes, or perhaps seeking to extract its substance for their own purposes, they refer constantly to minimalism, a label Pärt himself steadfastly rejects. “Two composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, changed the world at that time,” he says. “I have great respect for them. Still, I am not a minimalist. I understand that music critics will always find categories for my works and put them away in suitable drawers, but to call me a ‘holyminimalist’ sounds a bit ridiculous.”

Yet there are uncanny similarities between the careers of Reich and Pärt, who both started out exploring serialism—one in the U.S., the other in Estonia—before realizing the limits of the language. Both men, who have since become friends, then subsequently looked to early music as a source of inspiration. In the late 1960s, Arvo Pärt gave up composition entirely for a time after a serious creative crisis, before studying medieval composers such as Josquin des Prés, Guillaume de Machaut, Jacob Obrecht, and Johannes Ockeghem. This research led to the composition, in 1976, of the now well known piano piece Für Alina; it was a radical break with his previous work and it paved the way for a completely new style, which Pärt himself would describe as “tintinnabulum.” “I work with very few elements—only one or twovoices. I build out of primitive materials: the perfect chord, a specific key. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulum.” ...

Angèle Dubeau, violin
La Pietà