Pärt: Alina

On vinyl for the very first time, presented in a cardboard single sleeve including four-page insert with liner notes by Hermann Conen In July 1995, Arvo Pärt and Manfred Eicher convened at Frankfurt’s Festeburgkirche with four insightful musicians – the violinist Vladimir Spivakov, the cellist Dietmar Schwalke, and the pianists Alexander Malter and Sergej Bezrodny – to realize a recording intensely focused upon the composer’s “Für Alina” and “Spiegel im Spiegel”. The outcome, the ECM New Series album Alina, has a special place in the Estonian composer’s discography and for the ECM catalogue as well. “Für Alina”, written in 1976, was a breakthrough composition for Pärt, and symbolically the starting point for works that followed. “I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours,” said Arvo Pärt at the time. “Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.” Contemporary reviewers suggested that carefully following the flow of Alina would heighten perception. Gramophone described the album as “the voice of internal exile, self-communing and highly personal but wholly accessible for anyone willing to listen. The big danger of listening to Alina is that much of what you hear afterwards will suddenly sound like noise – too much noise. But it’s a risk worth taking.”