Arvo Part - Tabula Rasa LP
$54.98
Label: ECM
In 1984, ECM brought a new sound into the musical world with the release of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint. The record also marked the intersection of some of the most longstanding, significant musical collaborators in the label’s history: Arvo Pärt, Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett.
"The album that brought Pärt’s name to the West, and to the world (…).
Back in 1984 Tabula Rasa helped re-educate our ears and throw open the doors of our musical sensibilities to spatial domains that had otherwise been closed to us. Pärt’s near-minimalist “tintinnabulation” (a bell-like style based on a simple triad), his impeccable ear, sense of musical timing and deep spiritual engagement helped alter the way we listened in the late 20th century, cleansed us – or some of us – of the incessant need for musical “busyness”. Far from wearing off, the novelty of Pärt’s austerely meditative style has since become an essential component of our musical lives in the 21st century. (…) And there’s Tabula Rasa itself, scored for prepared piano, two solo violins, string quartet and double bass, the seemingly timeless second movement “Silentium” opening to an infinitely strange rising sequence on the piano that sets off a haunting bass drone. Nothing else in 20th-century music is quite like it and while various later recordings have done the piece proud, this finely tensed version by Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko with Alfred Schnittke at the piano and the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra under Saulius Sondeckis is a very definite first choice. (…) This is without any shadow of a doubt one of the great recordings of the last century.
– Rob Cowan, Gramophone (2023)
New vinyl reissue in facsimile gatefold edition, includes original liner notes by Wolfgang Sandner in enclosed booklet.