Arvo Part: Tintinnabuli

• Pärt: Fratres for Cello & Piano
• Pärt: Für Alina
• Pärt: Für Anna Maria
• Pärt: Pari intervallo
• Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel
• Pärt: Ukuaru valss
• Pärt: Variations for the Healing of Arinushka
• Veen: Pärtomania

Eight years ago, a 2-CD collection of Arvo Pärt's piano music became a Brilliant Classics bestseller (95053, now reissued as an LP), with Jeroen van Veen's playing capturing both the zeitgeist and the rapt silence of the Estonian composer's aesthetic. Jeroen van Veen's recordings rival the best from any source, and this set deserves high praise in every respect" (MusicWeb International). Everything is played with sensitivity and a crystalline sound.... almost unbearably beautiful" (BBC Music Magazine).

This sequel revisits a selection of these "modern classical" recordings and adds a trio of new recordings for cello and piano. Together with his wife Sandra, a pianist, and Joachim Eijlander, a cellist, Jeroen van Veen paints a portrait of Pärt the man and composer who closely followed the turbulent currents of music in the second half of the last century and yet sometimes deliberately set himself apart from them. The album begins with a new recording of Fratres in the familiar cello-piano lineup and continues with masterpieces of "new simplicity" from the 1970s such as Für Alina and Pari Intervallo.

These pieces began the harmonic world of "Tintinnabuli," characterized by open and slow harmonies for which Pärt later became world famous. The Ukuaru Valss offers a rare glimpse of the composer's lighter side before an extended version of Für Alina and then the eerie, undying echo of Spiegel im Spiegel, which encapsulates the sound of Part like no other piece.

The album closes with Pärtomania, a 20-minute tribute to the composer's sound world newly written by Jeroen van Veen for the same combination of string instruments and piano as Fratres and Spiegel im Spiegel. Van Veen himself discusses the unique world of Pärt's music in an introduction in the booklet.

- Arvo Pärt (born 1935) is undoubtedly one of the best known and most popular composers of our time. His very personal style, influenced by Gregorian chant, is based on slowly shifting patterns, tintinnabuli (bells) that create a meditative and hallucinatory effect, a visionary world of spiritual contemplation. Pärt's music is popular with both traditional classical audiences and an open-minded new generation.

- "Tintinnabuli" (Latin for "bells") refers to the principle that strives not for a progressive increase in complexity, but for an extreme reduction of the sound material and a limitation to the essentials; in other words, minimalism with maximum effect.

- This recording presents some of Pärt's best-known works: Fratres, Für Aline, Spiegel im Spiegel, Variations on the Recovery of Arinushka, in various settings for both solo piano and cello and piano. As a bonus track we hear a composition by pianist Jeroen van Veen, Pärtomania. The source material is techniques that Pärt also used in his compositions, slowly rising and descending scales, dissonances and consonances in balance, a calm and slow atmosphere with a sense of slowing down.

- Performed by Jeroen van Veen, pioneer and master of minimal music, and Dutch cellist Joachim Eijlander.