Alexei Lubimov, The Hilliard Ensemble - Arvo Pärt: Lamentate (2005)

Tempting as it may be, the typing of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt as a spiritual modernist hardly begins to assess the reach, import, and atmospheric integrity of his music. The more closely one listens to it, the more one hears between every heartbeat an alternating current, whereby shadows take solace in their own orientation of elements. Awareness of this dichotomy throws sanctity over the banal, and lends banality to the sacred, so that by the end of any Pärt listening experience one emerges changed yet profoundly the same—the self made clear under a magnifying glass polished by sound.
And so, while Lamentate may be said to represent a new direction for Pärt, whose music has hardly sounded this visceral since his formative dips into the avant-garde, it also feels like a reflection back to the womb, if only because the composer has so carefully woven into its basketry a conscious structural flaw. Said flaw is the essence of being human. It is what turns the visage of existence firmly away from the realm of fantasy toward the mirror of reality. This “lamento for the living” takes its inspiration from the enormous sculpture “Marsyas” by Anish Kapoor, at the time located in Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, and anchors a piano soloist (here it is Alexei Lubimov at the keyboard) in an orchestral ocean. In the album’s liner notes, Pärt describes his first encounter with the sculpture: “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.” Lamentate thus concerns itself with time—or, more precisely, with those who deal with time. The work was premiered at the sculptural site in London on February 7 and 8, 2003, and was recorded for ECM in 2004 at Germany’s Stadthalle Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart.
Before throwing us into these prophetic waters, the disc opens with the prayer for peace that is Da pacem Domine. Composed in 2004 on the basis of a ninth-century Gregorian antiphon and recorded here a year later at St. Gerold monastery near the Austrian mountains, it features the Hilliard Ensemble with soprano Sarah Leonard in a moving, timeless performance (the work reappears in updated form on In Principio). Like much of Pärt’s choral writing, its simplicity is its strength, requiring discipline from interpreters to bring out inner complexities. The antiphon is stretched to reveal a stratum unto itself, a melody to be born into and from. Its lines mark the binding of a book of experiences, the pages of which fade in one direction and become crisper in the other. All, however, bear equal wisdom of the divine hand that inscribed them.
With such pulchritude still warming the chest, Lamentate (2002) comes like a hit in the gut. Each of its ten movements is a monument—now fragile, now menacing—to some emotional shell. These surfaces act as palimpsests for the cellular activities that unspool from a brass incantation. A bass drum rumbles as would the hand of a god trapped beneath the earth’s surface pound for escape. In that frustration are flashes of a life confounded by lifelessness, declarations of dependence wrought in beat and bow. Over the piece’s own lifespan, the recording takes on a wavelength that cracks open intersections of space and time and spins from their yolks an entirely new cosmos. In this parallel universe, the winds are seemingly still yet utterly dynamic like nebulae as fetal kicks javelin fresh thought through a needle of questioning. The piano’s solitude provides the only answer it ever needed to breathe, for in the crafting of flesh lurks a question far beyond our articulation, and to which music nevertheless brings us steps closer. As relays of brass, piano, and percussion give way to whispering tides, echoes of earlier compositions (such as Psalom) make themselves known as a lilting oboe swims against the current. And even the nominal resolution treats alignment like a fantasy, leaving us by the end looking above for any sign of what it means to be below.