Customer Reviews

Arvo Part - St. John Passion / Hillier, The Hilliard Ensemble, Western Wind Choir

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The late 1980s recording of Arvo Part's PASSIO performed in Durham Cathedral has been issued on DVD twice. This brown-cover release is now seemingly out of print, but a European release by ArtHaus Musik in a blue cover is still widely available.

Part's Passion according to St. John is composed for solo baritone (Jesus), solo tenor (Pilate), solo vocal quartet (Evangelist), choir, violin, oboe, cello, bassoon and organ. If you're expect the lush tones and idyllic atmosphere of Part's other late music, this piece may come as a shock. Part does work with his tintinnabuli technique here, but the music is tied to the text in an uncompromising fashion. Every punctuation mark in the Vulgate Latin text is given a special effect on rhythm. When a comma or period is met in the text and the recitation briefly rests, the sentence is followed by a two- or three-note instrumental coda. All words of Christ are set with an organ drone underneath. Pilate speaks in a tritone and the crowd in tone clusters. The Passio thus develops as a slow-paced succession of block-like moments, all clearly related by the tintinnabuli technique. To many listeners this may well be boring, lethargic and robotic. But what appeals to me, generally a listener of 20th century modernism, about the PASSIO is how strictly serialized it is, the whole hour-long work generated out of one simple process.

Widely regarded as the definitive recording is the early 1990s ECM disc where the Hilliard Ensemble and Western Wind Choir conducted by Paul Hillier perform. This concert video, shot around the same time, features the same performers, except that Mary Seers replaces Lynne Dawson in the soprano part. The quality of this DVD is nothing spectacular -- this is clearly something originally intended for television broadcast and so we have fairly low definition video and two-channel sound. Nonetheless, the camera work is fine, displaying each performer when his turn comes, but also giving us some fine views of Durham Cathedral. The performance is prefixed by an introduction by Paul Gambaccini, although his remarks about the piece can't compete with the much more detailed text in the accompanying booklet. There are subtitles both for the original Latin text (nice that a company would go through the effort) as well as for the English translation.