Track Listing

1. Spiegel im Spiegel
2. Für Alina
3. Spiegel im Spiegel
4. Für Alina
5. Spiegel im Spiegel

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1344 in Music
• Released on: 1999-10-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 51 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
This is a remarkable release, both for its beauty and its novelty at programming. Für Alina is a two-minute solo piano piece composed by Pärt in l976 that ushered in his "tintinnabuli" style, that is, the bell-like, simple, no-notes-wasted method for which he has become beloved and famous. On this CD, pianist Alexander Malter plays it twice, as the second and fourth tracks; each iteration takes almost 11 minutes (Pärt assumed it would be embellished, and he chose this pair for the CD). There are minute variations in tempo, emphasis, and rubato from one to the other, but, all that being said, it amounts to 22 minutes of the most beautiful, contemplative music ever performed. Almost equally gentle is Spiegel im Spiegel , played as tracks 1, 3 and 5 and scored for piano and, respectively, violin, cello, and then violin again. The notes the instruments mirror one another (Spiegel is German for mirror), with notes added to the scale with each repetition, and so on. Almost impossible to describe in its loveliness, each of the three sets is beautiful; the cello in track 3 gives it extra mellowness. This is music staggering in its simple complexity and a treat for the ear and heart. --Robert Levine

Album Description
There have been other recordings of "Für Alina" and "Spiegel im Spiegel" but none like those on this disc, realized with the participation of the composer. Here Pärt, aided by exceptional interpreters, revisits those seminally important compositions which marked the birth of a new, "prismatic" period in his work, establishing a link between compositions embodying the fundamental traits of the "tintinnabuli style." Three interpretations of the duet 'Spiegel im Spiegel' (Mirror in the Mirror), for violin or cello and piano, become "formal pillars positioned before, between and after two solo renderings of 'Für Alina'", the latter performed with interpretive freedom by Alexander Malter.

Recorded 1995

Personnel:
Vladimir Spivakov (violin), Sergev Bezrodny (piano), Alexander Malter (piano), Dietmar Schwalke (cello)

Customer Reviews

Simply perfect
If someone was to ask me to go through my music collection and pick out the perfect piece of music, Alina would be it. Neither offensive nor boring or shallow, it's uncomplicated with thought provoking phrasing, holding one's attention time after time without growing tiring. Yes, the tracks are slightly repetitive and the CD only has 2 tracks (albeit varied), but believe me you could stick your player on repeat and have this running for a couple of hours without wanting to change it.

What is interesting is that everyone who has heard this CD playing has complemented the music and asked for the details. It's a winner with my wife, who despises at least 90% of my music taste. It even manages to calm my baby down.

Not music but Music
Did you ever hear a few notes softly dropped into a beautiful dream? But all you were left with on waking was a fading echo and simultaneous feelings of uplift and of strange sadness? Arvo Part has captured that haunting purity and that feeling in these tracks.

I find some of Part's works a little abrasive, and tend more towards the more contemplative tracks. Well, this CD is almost too contemplative to bear. There is a poem that goes: "Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past" and this CD may well have the same effect.

On the CD three versions of `Spiegel im Spiegel' (for violin and piano) and two excerpts of `Fur Alina' (piano solo) are interleaved - the motifs within the pieces are iterated, the pieces are reflective and the track order continues those themes. The two excerpts of Fur Alina are taken from a four hour improvisation of Alexander Malter.

Spiegel im Spiegel is beautiful, the violin takes flight like a skylark. And Fur Alina is, for me, a musical strandline: I doubt whether anything will ever reach it again. And you know what - nothing needs to.

Beyond the soul
Pärt´s music penetrates to the world of aesthetic and spiritual beauty. The apparent simplicity of the composition allows the mind and the soul to hear and experience the music as such. Our two teenage boys took to it like fish to water, grew mindfully silent first time they heard it and played it the next morning for waking up and getting a good start of the day music. Pärt´s work is indeed a prism that separates the white light of a composition and allows you to see and hear the colours of the music.