The 15-member ensemble
Vox Clamantis has performed the music of
Arvo Pärt for some years. This album was recorded in 2021 and 2022 but was released in 2025 to mark
Pärt's 90th birthday. Much of the music, other than the opening
Nunc dimittis and the
Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen, is quite recent. So for both performers and composer, the album has the qualities of a culmination, and it is impressive indeed. One hears the precision of which this group is capable right at the beginning of the program in the
Nunc dimittis, and one also experiences the degree to which the
ECM label is poles ahead of anyone else sonically in recording
Pärt's music; the sound from the Haapsalu Cathedral in Estonia is profoundly meditative but not distant; "cathedral" is not quite the right word for this compact structure. There are many attractions here, including the unusually detailed text-painting in the
Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen (hear the dissonance in "O Sproß aus Isais Wurzel"), the deep mysticism of
Für Jan van Eyck, the declamatory
Kleine Litanei, and the presence of
And I heard a voice..., which, although its title is in English here, is
Pärt's only setting of a sacred text in the Estonian language. These add up to an album that gathers power as it proceeds, and marks a milestone in the recording of a composer who is rightly recorded often, but rarely this well. ~ James Manheim
