The usually holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt, for all its simplicities, is virtuoso music, thriving on precise control of texture and resonance. His works are associated with professional choirs that exercise this control to a greater degree than the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and director Graham Ross do here. The young singers are attractive and clean, but they do not deliver a knife's edge. However, what the listener gets instead is a fresh program. Now that Pärt is one of the world's most frequently performed ...
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The usually holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt, for all its simplicities, is virtuoso music, thriving on precise control of texture and resonance. His works are associated with professional choirs that exercise this control to a greater degree than the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and director Graham Ross do here. The young singers are attractive and clean, but they do not deliver a knife's edge. However, what the listener gets instead is a fresh program. Now that Pärt is one of the world's most frequently performed composers, it's worth exploring his relationship to other nearby choral styles, and that's what the Choir of Clare College presents. The program includes Plainscapes by Peteris Vasks, certainly within Pärt's orbit but both warmer (with its solo violin and cello, and its landscape pictorialism) and bleaker than the spirituality of Pärt. The second entr'acte is a Miserere by James MacMillan: not a minimalist work, certainly, but one that shows how a striving toward rigorous, unsentimental...
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