The original Gramophone review

Pärt Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem

Hilliard Ensemble / Paul Hillier (ECM New Series)

The Hilliard Ensemble solemnly perform what must surely be the bleakest, most ritualistic Passion to be composed since Schütz. Never one to dress up his religious work in ostentatious garb, Arvo Pärt has selected the most severe, detached and economical musical style for this Passion according to St John. More a liturgical act than a concert piece, it makes no concessions whatever to modern conventions of Passion music. Stubbornly repetitive and monochrome, deliberately anti-dramatic and neutral, it achieves its extraordinary and noble effect through the simplest of means: measured recitative, piquant chanted choruses, the clear, bright timbres of a small instrumental ensemble. The work plays for 70 minutes without a break, a fact emphasised by the CD being entirely unbanded. Not once during this vast span does the underlying tonality waver; once exposed, the small repertoire of textures merely rotates, combining into new orders. For the role of the Evangelist, Pärt writes for a mixed consort of four soloists accompanied by instruments. Not all of them sing or play at any given time, and indeed the texture constantly reduces in some way, occasionally paring down to a single voice; but in character even this central narrative part remains stylistically consistent. What gives the setting its form and principal variety is, of course, the biblical text, which glows with uncanny radiance at the heart of the music. Because its scale is relatively intimate, this is not the easiest piece to project in concert, nor did it quite work in televised form. But on record it makes its full impact. So well do the Hilliard Ensemble and the Western Wind Chamber Choir now know the setting that they sing it with a conviction and familiarity that far transcends the majority of recordings of modern music. It is also a piece that seems tailored to their individual voices: Michael George’s rich bass for the solo part of Jesus, for example, and alto David James, who sings some high, exposed passages as one of the Evangelists with ease and great beauty. John Milsom (2/89)

Edward Breen It was the mid-1990s and I was still at school when I first heard Arvo Pärt’s Passio. It was an impulse purchase that influenced the future direction of my life, not as a performer or academic, but as an engaged consumer of music. Perhaps it was the ECM cover that I desired at first, having been transfixed by ‘Officium’ (10/94) that same year. I felt the lure of these minimalist designs and their Conran-esque vibes, but more so I trusted the Hilliard Ensemble to be a guide in new repertoire – and they never let me down. Years later I read Laura Dolp’s essay about those iconic sleeves and now recommend it to anyone who remembers that intersection of sacred minimalism and the early music revival.

Fabrice Fitch There’s a lot to unpack there! But already we see this recording (and the work) through very different lenses, not least because I was an active observer when this came out. Despite the splash it made, and notwithstanding my admiration for the Hilliard Ensemble, I put off listening to it because I hadn’t been keen on what I’d heard of Pärt’s music previously. About a year later, I was talking about Pärt with Brian Ferneyhough, with whom I was studying, and he surprised me by suggesting that I should listen to Passio; in fact, I recall that we sat down and did so there and then. What struck me most was that techniques that I found unsatisfying when deployed on a small scale (I suppose I had Pärt’s tintinnabuli technique in mind) became much more convincing, even compelling, across a broader canvas.

EB If I remember correctly, I found Pärt’s music immediately compelling and atmospheric. These days I might be tempted to talk about his sound world, but back then, knowing nothing of his tintinnabuli, I simply found this whole disc very moving, if not slightly troubling. Of course, I knew some Passion music as a choirboy, but Passio was different: lonely and stark, and it had the added frisson of inhabiting a single track so had to be listened to as a whole, which appealed to me as a teenage poseur. I was reading Franz Kafka and Jean Genet at that time too, so I must have been insufferable! Still, this stands the test of time – it transcends such personal memories and offers a freshly meditative experience on relistening. I now also understand so much more of John Milsom’s review: I see his point about ritual, and I particularly appreciate the ‘liturgical act’ designation. But I didn’t, and still don’t, hear it as monochrome – to me it’s a kaleidoscopic, sonorous block of A minor. In fact, in my mind is Nicholas Kenyon’s description of it as having ‘ethereal, cool harmonies which have echoes of the parallel harmonies of organum in the early Middle Ages’ (The Life of Music, 2021).

FF I suspect that Milsom’s ‘monochrome’ reflects how each component of the ensemble is assigned very specific functions. I don’t think he intends it pejoratively; he’s only contextualising it in terms of post-Renaissance Passion music generally. I think what I admire especially is the clarity of the concept and execution; more specifically, the almost bloody-minded determination to derive maximum variety of results from deliberately restricted means. OK, Schütz is the obvious comparator, but I think the style owes more to the syllabic movements of the Machaut and the Tournai Masses, slowed down – even including the connective ‘instrumental’ (or untexted) snippets between verses. I doubt whether Pärt would have heard the Machaut performed with voices only, so the fact that those snippets are given to instruments can hardly be a coincidence.

EB Oh, I see what you mean. I hadn’t thought about it in terms of Machaut’s Mass, but now that you say that, I feel that there is a certain affinity between the Pärt and that performance of the Machaut by Pro Musica Antiqua and Safford Cape (1956) – especially the short instrumental bursts on untexted passages in the Gloria. Yet what always plays on my mind is what Pärt himself has said of his pared-down style: ‘I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.’ That influences my listening very much, because I do find this piece more spiritual for having restricted means. There’s a super essay by Robert Sholl in The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (2012) entitled ‘Arvo Pärt and Spirituality’ which links the ‘overriding sense of lamentation and of grief’ in Passio directly to ‘the intensification of minimal sound materials’. Another aspect of the power behind Passio is that it doesn’t necessarily lead anywhere. Its very stillness lends a sharp focus to the horror of the Crucifixion.

FF Well, I’m not sure I agree with you that it doesn’t lead anywhere, because that shift to D major for the chorus’s valedictory supplication really is a stunning coup de théâtre, worth the 70-minute wait. (There’s a piano concerto by Michael Finnissy that does the exact opposite: about a half-hour of bedlam, then a couple of minutes of the most wonderful stillness right at the end: it’s a terrific way to structure a piece.)

But I think it’s time we mentioned that all these effects depend on a flawless, perfectly timed performance, with all the details in place – and that’s what Paul Hillier achieves. The choir brings an awesome crunch to Pärt’s dissonances (like the one on ‘Joannem’ at the very start); they sound terrific. And it’s worth singling out oboist Melinda Maxwell’s awesome control: straight and unwavering as a die, and clear as a bell.

EB That we can agree on! The performance is sensational, especially from the Hilliard Ensemble, and Michael George is compelling as Jesus even though much of the time he cycles around four notes. There’s a control and discipline in this performance that never wavers, especially when countertenor David James’s Evangelist role rises to a top F on ‘crucifigeretur’ (‘Finally, Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified’).

I appreciate there is a double connection with early music in operation too: not only did Pärt study Josquin and Ockeghem himself, but here he is working with performers steeped in the early music revival and the foremost interpreters of early polyphony in their day. In fact, coincidentally, the original Gramophone review of Passio appeared next to a review of the Hilliard’s recording of Ockeghem’s Requiem.

Did you ever see the TV broadcast mentioned in the review?

FF I haven’t seen the video, but I’m glad you raise James’s top F – another high point, in both senses.

Crucially, this recording seems to me to have marked a watershed, signalling a rupture in the linkage between early music and a certain kind of modernism, stretching back to Webern but taking in Boulez and Ligeti, Maderna and Nono, Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies, and many others. Back then I don’t think there was any other way to describe what Pärt was doing but postmodernism, and here postmodernism (and quite a new expression of it) was claiming early polyphony for itself. Remember that ‘Officium’ and all the rest came later, after Hillier had left the ensemble; I think it was this recording that opened the floodgates.

EB You’re right, I also think it marked a new direction for the Hilliard Ensemble, and despite this disc being a collaboration with other superb performers, it has lodged in my mind as a Hilliard event. Incidentally, it was the last of their albums to be released on vinyl and the first to feature baritone Gordon Jones. The more prescient point is that it is also Pärt’s 90th birthday this year, and I’ve really enjoyed revisiting this album as it has reminded me of how instantly I connected with his tintinnabuli – that ingenious technique of melodic cycling through the notes of a chord. Can you think of many other tonal compositional techniques dating from the second half of the 20th century?

I’ve also enjoyed reading back through the Gramophone archive, particularly Milsom’s review of Arbos (9/87), in which he writes, ‘Why, one asks, has it taken so very long for the music of this far-from-youthful Estonian composer to make its impact on the West?’ Today Pärt is one of the most frequently performed living composers, and it’s been a great joy to follow his trajectory.