'A landmark recording. Go and buy it' (Choir & Organ)
'Outstandingly good on each front: clarity, balance, intonation, timbre, dynamic and textural control and, perhaps most important of all, feeling' (Classic CD)
'Committed and definitive performances of this intense music' (Organists' Review)
'Polyphony's singing is immensely cultivated; bright, clear, immaculately phrased, and gorgeously balanced' (American Record Guide)
'Pärt's music remains an object of unstinting wonder' (BBC Music Magazine)
Berliner Messe
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Annum per Annum
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Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen
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The impressive Berlin Mass which opens the disc was written in 1990, the Credo being a fascinating major-key reworking of the earlier minor-mode Summa; very much an expression of joy at the lifting of the Soviet embargo on 'sacred' music in Estonia. Annum per Annum is a monumental work for solo organ and is here performed on the organ of St Paul's Cathedral: a thoroughly exhilarating experience. The disc ends with the masterpiece De Profundis. This most powerful of texts draws from Pärt an inexorable momentum from a beginning almost out of nothing to a devastating climax.