Pärt: Wherever I Go

Gunter Herbig's meditative guitar albums have become cult objects far beyond the classical music scene. After 'ex oriente' with arrangements of piano music by Gurdjieff/de Hartmann (BIS Records) and the Villa-Lobos album 'Tristorosa' (Aldila Records), he has now taken on the iconic music of Arvo Pärt on his Gretsch White Falcon.

He has transcribed vocal and instrumental pieces of various sizes and settings in tablature for the guitar, as has been the custom since the 14th century in order to reproduce polyphonic works on the solo instrument. Not only does the music gain an incomparable breadth and atmospheric liveliness through the resonance of the electric guitar as well as through the possibilities of subsequent shaping of the sound; at the same time, Arvo Pärt's music resounds here completely pure and simple, reduced to the essential, magical in its eremitic power, as close to silence as we already know from Herbig's Gurdjieff album, and as perhaps only Gunter Herbig is able to manifest in this way combining inner warmth and outer beauty.