Like a multi-decker sandwich, this record alternates thick slices of Arvo Part's early work with the refined elegance of his later music, on which Part's currently high reputation rests. The three later pieces included here (Summa, Fratres and Festina lente) have all been recorded before. Of the four older works, three are not otherwise available on record (Collage teemal BACH, If Bach had been a Beekeeper and Credo); the Second Symphony has been championed once before by Neeme Jarvi, in the company of the Cello Concerto, Perpetuum mobile and the other two symphonies (BIS).
Tastes will differ, but I find myself enjoying the filling far more than the bread. Festina lente, for string orchestra, is one of Part's most exquisitely bell-like scores, and the Philharmonia here play it beautifully. On ECM, however, it's more strongly coupled with the Miserere and Sarah was ninety years old to form one of the most appealing Part records on the market. The short Summa is properly a setting of the Creed for four voices, and it has been sung perfectly by The Hilliard Ensemble (ECM, 9/87); Jarvi's new version is an arrangement for strings. Fratres also exists in more than one incarnation. Two other realizations, respectively for 12 cellos or for violin and piano, are available on ECM ((CD) 817 764-2). Now we have a third arrangement, for string orchestra. To my mind this is the most effective yet, and it has the advantage of including all nine of the intended variations. This track is probably the record's best selling-point.
Set beside these gentle delicacies, the four early pieces seem garrulous, confrontational and bewilderingly eclectic, with their uncomfortable mix of high modernism and variously digested quotation—largely of Bach, but also of Tchaikovsky in the Symphony No. 2. It's instructive to hear them, if only to learn more about the context from which Part's later music emerged. In their own right, however, I doubt if these scores would have earned the composer a fraction of the international acclaim he now enjoys.'