14.07.2025 | Latest
“I was like an upbeat suspended in the air, waiting for the phrase to start.”
– Arvo Pärt, on the compositional approach initiated with Für Alina
Thirty years ago, in July 1995, Arvo Pärt and Manfred Eicher convened at Frankfurt’s Festeburgkirche with four insightful musicians–the violinist Vladimir Spivakov, the cellist Dietmar Schwalke, and the pianists Alexander Malter and Sergej Bezrodny – to realize a recording intensely focused upon the composer’s Für Alina and Spiegel im Spiegel. The outcome, the ECM New Series album Alina, has a special place in the Estonian composer’s discography and for the ECM catalogue as well.
If one can speak of definitive interpretations of music of such delicacy, then these versions, made with Arvo Pärt’s engaged input, have remained the reference renditions, on an album that gracefully traces a larger arc, while also embodying a journey to the origins of the tintinnabuli style. As Hermann Conen puts it in the liner notes, the album finds its form by “concentrating on an indispensable core of material. Three interpretations of the duet Spiegel im Spiegel, become formal pillars positioned before, between and after the two solo renderings of Für Alina.”
Für Alina, written in 1976, was a breakthrough composition for Pärt, and symbolically the starting point for works that followed. A bare-boned piece, jettisoning everything except the essential, it has no fixed metre or tempo. A performance marking in the manuscript calls for a “calm, exalted” feeling and “listening to one’s inner self.” Encouraged by composer and producer to find ever new ways of inflecting its melody, paying meticulous attention to phrasing and dynamics and to the surrounding silence in the Frankfurt church, Alexander Malter arrives at deeply moving interpretations that have an improvisational, reflective feeling.
Reflections, in a literal sense, are at the heart of Spiegel im Spiegel [Mirror in the mirror], whose title directly reflects its construction, with each ascending melodic line followed by a descending mirror phrase. The piece, one of the last that Pärt wrote before departing from Estonia, was commissioned by and dedicated to the violinist Vladimir Spivakov, who plays it, with Sergej Bezrodny on piano, in the performances that open and close the recording, extending the idea of prismatic reflection to the whole of Alina. In the middle of the album, Dietmar Schwalke and Alexander Malter play the version of Spiegel im Spiegel for cello and piano.
“I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours,” said Arvo Pärt at the time. “Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.” Contemporary reviewers suggested that carefully following the flow of Alina would heighten perception. Gramophone described the album as “the voice of internal exile, self-communing and highly personal but wholly accessible for anyone willing to listen. The big danger of listening to Alina is that much of what you hear afterwards will suddenly sound like noise – too much noise. But it’s a risk worth taking.”
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Meanwhile, of course, the work continues, carrying forward the story begun with Tabula Rasa in 1984. In September, ECM will release a new Arvo Pärt album, And I heard a voice, with the Vox Clamantis ensemble, recorded in Haapsalu Cathedral in Estonia. More details soon.
