Marking Arvo Pärt’s 85th birthday (September 2020) and the 75th anniversary of the BR Chorus (May 2021).

After Te Deum (900511), Arvo Pärt – Live (900319) and Miserere (900527), Stabat Mater is already the fourth CD to emerge from the close artistic collaboration between the composer and the Bavarian Radio Chorus, and to be recently released by BR-KLASSIK.

In addition to the impressive Stabat Mater, this newly-released CD offers some of the works that are key to the composer’s stylistic development, and rarely appear in the concert repertoire or as recordings.

Like almost no other contemporary composer, the Estonian Arvo Pärt (born 1935) has succeeded in bringing sacred music back to the attention of a larger audience, even outside the church service. Because of its meditative character and its return to the simplest basic musical forms, his music gives us an insight into key spiritual moments. To this end, even before his emigration from the Soviet Union, Pärt invented what he referred to as the “tintinnabuli style” (Latin for “little bells”) of composing. In 1977 he delivered one of the first significant examples of this style with the first version of Fratres (Brothers), which still has no fixed and prescribed instrumentation. In its ascetic austerity and almost liturgical solemnity, the work is reminiscent of a communal prayer or a spiritual act.

The choral and instrumental works presented on the new CD from BR-KLASSIK are fully in line with this understanding of sound: four works for string orchestra, La Sindone for violin and orchestra, and Stabat Mater for choir and string orchestra, covering all the composer’s creative periods between 1977/1983 and 2008.