PART: ARVO PART COLLECTION (9 CDS)

The most comprehensive collection ever issued of Arvo Pärt’s music, surveying the full range of an output from one of the most distinctive voices in late 20th-century music.Subsequently and exhaustively imitated, the language of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is immediately recognisable, speaking with the ‘still small voice of calm’ amid chaos and confusion. Born in 1935, Pärt reached compositional maturity in the late 60s with a series of works which painfully juxtaposed modernist dissonances with diatonic islands of peace, often Christian in message and raining down criticism from Soviet authorities.At this point the evolution of his style produced an unassuming piano piece, Für Alina, which holds the key to the next 25 years of his music. For it he developed a ‘tintinnabuli’ technique where melodies move step by step around a central pitch, producing a soundworld timeless yet original and distinctively new.From the technique grew instant classics of a genre at one remove from the