Symphony No. 3
Combined with:
Pärt: "Fratres" for string orchestra and percussion
Pärt: Symphony No. 3
EMI Angel CDC 5 55619 2
EMI Angel CDC 5 55619 2
Here is a natural and effective coupling of spiritual-minimalist pieces from the Baltic and the Balkans; and how good it is to see this music at last on a major label with a top-flight international orchestra.
The benefits are clear in Kancheli’s Third Symphony, with its extreme contrasts of solo vocal keening and tutti Stravinskian outbursts. Here the spaciousness of EMI’s recording, made in Watford Town Hall, and the refinement of the LPO’s playing are clear gains over the rival Georgian performance (which comes with the added drawback of having been transferred a whole tone too high by the original Melodiya team). The mesmeric folk-derived lament which punctuates the structure was sung on the earlier recording by Rustavi choir-member Gamlet Gonashvili, for whose unearthly tenor Kancheli conceived it. On the new issue David James’s ethereal countertenor, familiar from his work with the Hilliard Ensemble, is a valid alternative and one sanctioned by the composer.
Franz Welser-Most’s basic tempo for the piece is less extreme than Kakhidze’s, giving an overall duration of 23'30'' as against 30'11''; by the same token the impression of hypnotically sustained timelessness is slightly diminished. So for the fullest appreciation of this extraordinary music, both versions are needed.
Pärt’s Third Symphony, composed in 1971, two years before Kancheli’s, is something of a half-way house in the composer’s journey towards his now famous ascetic minimalism. Its chant-based archaisms sit rather oddly beside reminders of the twentieth-century mainstream, like a meditation annoyingly distracted by the outside world. Pärt’s real breakthrough came with pieces like Fratres, which first appeared six years later, where the technical means are even slighter but the contemplative end is the more fully realized.
The performance of the symphony is, by the smallest of margins, more refined than that of its dedicatee Neeme Jarvi on BIS, though that rival version does have the other two symphonies Pärt symphonies as the valuable couplings. Fratres is beautifully shaded and sustained by Welser-Most and his players, as it is on the rival Teldec recording of seven different versions of the piece.
Gramophone, August 1996
While the Estonian Arvo Pärt conjures bells and smells, the Georgian Giya Kancheli carves his structures in granite. Yet the latter’s Third Symphony (1973) starts with a reminiscence of folk melody, wafted on the breeze by David James’s unaccompanied countertenor, and it is this which forms the basis of the whole 23-minute single movement. Like everything I’ve heard by this composer, it’s take it or leave it music.
Kancheli’s fundamental sound-blocks – whether insistently or ominously repetitive, ethereally melodic or atmospherically textural – are juxtaposed with a bizarre sense of timing; their bold dynamic contrasts cause the booklet notes to include a warning about damage to the listener’s equipment. The wordless voice returns after ten minutes and haunts proceedings to the end, though a tendency to the frenetic takes over for a while. There are even some bells. Kancheli’s music really demands to be heard live, and the Third Symphony doesn’t pack the punch of, say, his Seventh. But this performance gives the authentic flavour.
Pärt’s Third Symphony (1971) has the expected chants, chorales and medieval cadences. The totality is evidently the work of the composer of the later, ubiquitous Fratres – the concluding filler, in a version for string orchestra and percussion – yet oddly unsatisfactory: more like a curious exercise in different techniques than a real composition. All the performances here seem lovingly prepared and finely executed.
Keith Potter
BBC Music Magazine