ECM Records is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its New Series imprint with a reissue of its inaugural release, Arvo Pärt’s influential Tabula Rasa. Manfred Eicher, the founder of ECM, was inspired to launch the imprint in 1984 after hearing Tabula Rasa while driving. Tabula Rasa introduced the Estonian composer to a global audience and is considered one of the greatest recordings of the 20th century. Out September 13, the gatefold vinyl reissue includes original liner notes in an enclosed booklet.
Check out the video teasing the release.
Tabula Rasa includes two versions of the piece “Fratres,” the first performed by Keith Jarrett on piano and Gidon Kremer on violin while the second features the 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. “Frantes” (translating to “Brothers” in Latin) was composed in 1977 and has become one of Pärt’s most popular pieces. The piece showcases the basic principles of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style, a composition system that reduces musical parameters to the basic, primordial elements of sound.
“Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten” is conducted by Dennis Russel Davies and performed by Saatsorchester Stuttgart. The piece was named in tribute to the late English composer and conductor after Pärt learned of his death on December 5, 1976. “I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music–I had had the impression of the same kind of purity in the ballads of Guillaume de Machaut,” Pärt later said. “And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally–and now it would not come to that.”
A double concerto for two violins, string orchestra, and prepared piano, “Tabula Rasa” is conducted by Saulius Sondeckis and performed by Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra. The featured violin soloists are the future stars Gideon Kremer and Tatjana Grindenko while Pärt’s close friend Alfred Schnittke played the prepared piano.
A 2002 piece by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross explores the origins and impact of Tabula Rasa. “He has put his finger on something that is almost impossible to put into words—something to do with the power of music to obliterate the rigidities of space and time,” writes Ross. “One after the other, his chords silence the noise of the self, binding the mind to an eternal present.”
