I Am The True Vine

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Is your local cathedral preparing to celebrate a major milestone? Just call Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and he'll whip up a choral tailormade to your church's needs, regardless of denomination. Or so it would seem. I Am the True Vine is the latest offering of liturgical music served up by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, along with the Pro Arte Singers. Hillier wrote the book on Pärt (literally - Arvo Pärt, Oxford University Press, 1997), and is thus the right man to craft canonical recordings of the world's most popular contemporary composer.

This selection includes "Ode IX", which was the germ of his sprawling Kanon Pokajanen, written on the 750th anniversary of the Cologne Cathedral, while other pieces were commissioned to celebrate the 900th anniversary of Norwich Cathedral and the 350th anniversary of the Karlstad Diocese in Sweden, respectively. The second half of this CD is taken up by "Berliner Messe", originally composed by Pärt as a choral work for four singers and organ in 1990 (and released on Te Deum[ECM]), and subsequently re-orchestrated for strings and chorus. Here, Hillier's four-member Theatre of Voices and organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent revisit the piece, this time based on the string orchestral score. I Am the True Vine is another essential addition to the Pärt catalogue.