Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir

This CD, which includes several first recordings of music by Kastalski, Izvekov & others, draws upon the rich treasury of 19th- & 20th-century liturgical hymnography and carols of the Nativity Feast, which were suppressed during the tragic events of the 20th century and which have only come to light in recent years.

This title was released for the first time in 2006.

Arvo Pärt returns to symphonic structure and scope, in a new work scored for string orchestra, harp, tympani and percussion: the Symphony No. 4 ‘Los Angeles’. Almost 40 years after his Third Symphony, the Estonian composer wrote his Fourth for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen – and ECM releases their premiere performance, recorded live in January 2009, to celebrate Pärt’s 75th birthday (on 11 September).

This is the first symphonic work Pärt has written since developing his “tintinnabulation” style. A composition in three movements, it opens with characteristically shimmering suspended chords, and an extraordinary journey begins. “The symphony is large,” wrote Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times, “and exceedingly beautiful.”

The Fourth Symphony is both literally and figuratively a 'musical setting', based on an underlying text. Canon of the Guardian Angel forms the work’s point of departure, determining its structure down to the smallest details. It was recorded live at LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. The 37-minute work is augmented on disc by a new montage of “fragments” of Kanon Pokajanen, a piece which Pärt feels is closely related to the symphony. “To my mind, the two works belong together and form a stylistic unity.”

A second birthday celebration from ECM will be the release on 13 September of a special deluxe version of Tabula rasa (4763879), Arvo Pärt’s international breakthrough album in 1984. This book/CD edition will include study scores of all four pieces on the disc, previously unreleased facsimile manuscripts, liner notes, an introductory essay by Paul Griffiths and exclusive photographs.

Paul Hillier leads the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in a programme tracing the Balto-Finnic folksong tradition through the works of Jean Sibelius, Cyrillus Kreek, Erik Bergman and Veljo Tormis.

Rembrandt’s engraving The Three Crosses (1653) inspired Frank Martin to conceive his oratorio Golgotha. As he explained while he was still working on the score: „Once I had seen these etchings, I was positively haunted by the idea of realising an image of the Passion with my own resources. . . I would have liked to concentrate this whole terrible and magnificent drama in a very short work, just as Rembrandt had done on his modest little rectangle of paper. But... I had no choice but to come round to the idea of an oratorio, which was capable by its very dimensions of creating the framework and atmosphere necessary for the expression of a subject of this kind.“ Inevitably Martin’s second oratorio was influenced by J.S. Bach, with whose Passions Martin, the tenth child of a Huguenot pastor, had been familiar since childhood and which he willingly described as ‘precedents’ for the genre.

Ten musical tableaux, grouped into two parts of roughly equal length, relate the story of Christ’s Passion from the entrance into Jerusalem until the Resurrection. Martin draws on all four Gospels, interspersed with excerpts from the Meditations and Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, and individual verses from the Psalms and liturgy for Holy Saturday. The final part of the work became an epilogue, anticipating the events of Easter Day, replacing mourning with hope. Here Martin seems to have captured that ‘strange white light’ of transfiguration which he had so admired in Rembrandt’s etching: the paradox of a luminous darkness. The score was completed in Amsterdam on 8th June 1948, and premièred a little less than a year later, on 29th April 1949, in Geneva. By his own admission, Martin had not intended his oratorio, composed without a commission, for public performance. For this artist deeply shaken by the horrors of war, recourse to the Passion genre and its core religious message may have been an attempt to restore his own faith in the future and thereby to raise a milestone in that time of devastation, when Europe was at zero hour. Daniel Reuss founded Cappella Amsterdam in 1990, which he has since turned into a full-time professional ensemble. He conducted the RIAS Kammerchor for the first time in 2000 and during his four years as artistic director of the choir (2003-6), they made five recordings for harmonia mundi. In February 2007, he made his debut at English National Opera in Handel’s Agrippina. He became artistic director and chief conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in September 2008.

In recent years Arvo Pärt has written some significant works for larger forces mostly commissioned by major institutions for celebratory occasions. Most impressive is the dramatic 25-minute In Principio (2003) for mixed choir and symphony orchestra which sets to music the famous opening of St John’s gospel, “In principio erat Verbum”. In its five movements, “tintinnabuli” diatonicism is contrasted with sophisticated harmonic procedures, massive brass chords are juxtaposed with almost stoic calm in the choir. The purely orchestral La Sindone (The holy shroud), a highly expressive piece which mirrors the shroud’s symbolic shine-through effects in delicate string textures, was premièred in Turin at the 2006 Winter Olympics whereas Caecilia, vergine romana for mixed choir and orchestra was a commission for Rome’s jubilee in 2000. Da pacem Domine, one of Pärt’s most serenely beautiful pieces, responded in a very subtle way to the 2004 terror attacks in Madrid’s Atocha station. The piece, heard a cappella on the 2005 ECM release Lamentate, appears in an even more beautiful version for choir and strings. Two instrumental compositions complete the CD: the rhythmically energetic Mein Weg and Für Lennart in memoriam, a still piece in homage to late Estonian president Lennart Georg Meri.

The exemplary interpretations, displaying great clarity and sensitivity, by some of the best Pärt experts (among them noted conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir - which he directed from its foundation in 1981 until 2001 - and the country’s leading orchestra, the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra) were recorded in Estonia with the assistance of the composer and will surely be one of the strongest 2009 releases on ECM.

Toivo Tulev is one of the principal figures in Estonian music today. Deeply influenced by his study of Gregorian chant,Tulev’s works have a mystic, incantatory dimension. Songs is the title of the largest work on this CD, but it reflects on the other works as well, and not only because they are vocal or choral. During the 1980s, the composer was a member of the EPCC: this background has given him an innate sense of what singers can do. Dedicated to Paul Hillier, Songs is a polychoral piece with various groups of singers and instruments distributed around the concert venue.The text is a collage created by the composer from various sources: the Bible, the Song of Songs and two poems, Cantico espiritual and Coplas del alma que pena por ver a Dios by St John of the Cross.The small orchestra includes recorder and duduk, an instrument whose longing quality is well suited to the poems. World-renowned countertenor Robin Blaze joins Paul Hillier and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in this world premiere recording.