Piano Works (Incls 'Für Alina')

"This is a well-conceived crash-course in significant moments in the development of Pärt's music...With its visceral Romantic gestures convincingly realised by JoAnn Falletta, Lamentate, a reaction to Kapoor's work, is imbued with a sense of anxiety. Dark textures and violent outbursts, recalling Pärt's early avant-garde style, almost conceal the underpinning tintinnabulist matrix."
(BBC Music)

"Marsyas [the Lamentate], is by some way the least successful piece here, an uneasy mix of bombastic, quasi-romantic piano concerto with hazy spirituality...But all the other piano pieces are wonderful: burbling baroque toccatas, hypnotic variations (echoing his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten) and the pared down Für Anna Maria of 2006, new to disc. Fine playing by Ralph van Raat."
(The Observer)

Arvo Pärt's piano works range from his fi rst public statement as a composer, the Zwei Sonatinen, to his latest, the life affi rming miniature Für Anna Maria. Moving away from his 1960s atonal language, Pärt found an essence of truth in music embodied in the simple lines of Für Alina. Lamentate is a vast monument which the composer has described as a lament 'not for the dead, but for the living'. Multi award-winning pianist Ralph van Raat has been praised for his 'sensitive and technically refi ned' playing of Hans Otte's Book of Sounds (8572444) (MusicWeb International).