This package presents two of Arvo Pürt's most familiar works--already indisputable classics--Tabula Rasa and Fratres. For all of their "minimalist" technique, there's a fathomless--call it timeless, if you will--beauty to these scores the deeper you plunge into their hypnotic sound world. The best place to discover them remains ECM's breakthrough release Tabula Rasa. Unlike Gidon Kremer (the superb interpreter of that recording), and despite an epiphany he mentions in the booklet--likening this music to the desert landscape of Utah--Gil Shaham doesn't seem to grasp one of the key components of that beauty: its austerity, its distance, as through a glass. There's an exquisite finish to his tone, to be sure, but Shaham essentially over-romanticises this music, coating it with a lovely but undifferentiated sheen, although he does hint at the vocal character of his lines. Passages of Fratres thus sound curiously tamed, as if we could be listening to such pastoral blandishments as The Lark Ascending or, in Tabula Rasa, to a Vivaldi andante. Despite this disappointment, the disc offers a thoroughly compelling account of the Third Symphony (1971) by its dedicatee, Neeme Järvi. It's fascinating to hear Pärt's points of origin--Soviet music, chant from the Orthodox Church, the fascination with bell sounds--so clearly delineated and transmogrified as in this work. Järvi molds its colourful but sombre scoring into vividly dramatic shapes, hinting at Shostakovich in the chasm-deep bass lines tugging against the piercing treble or--as in the haunting opening solo--at the bleak majesty of a Sibelius landscape. The very success of Pärt's better-known works has tended to obscure the quality of such earlier pieces, but this performance helps widen the perspective to a more inclusive one. – Thomas May

1 Fratres, for violin & piano
Composé par Arvo Part
avec Gidon Kremer, Keith Jarrett

2 Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, for string orchestra & bell
Composé par Arvo Part
Joué par Stuttgart State Orchestra
Dirigé par Dennis Russell Davies

3 Fratres, for 4, 8 or 12 cellos
Composé par Arvo Part
avec Twelve Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic

4 Tabula rasa, concerto for 2 violins (or violin & viola), prepared piano & string orchestra
Composé par Arvo Part
Joué par Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra
avec Tatjana Grindenko, Alfred Schnittke, Gidon Kremer
Dirigé par Saulius Sondeckis