PŠrt, Redford, Kotter, Byrd, Schlick, etc

COMPOSERS: Byrd,etc,Kotter,Part,Redford,Schlick
LABELS: Winter & Winter
ALBUM TITLE: Collection: Tintinnabulum
WORKS: Works
PERFORMER: Lorenzo Ghielmi (organ)
CATALOGUE NO: 910 055-2

Call me old-fashioned, but glitzy packaging instantly lowers my expectations and usually betokens the triumph of style over substance. This disc certainly goes for the style vote, in mixing Pärt’s ‘holy minimalism’ with Renaissance chorale preludes, interleaved with the hugely evocative sound of continental bells. The overall effect is one of weightlessness – the interconnections between 500-year-old liturgical music and Pärt’s shimmering, flimsy beauty are, at best, casual. Quite what the composer of the Buxheimer Orgelbuch Redeuntes would have made of having his teaching pieces set amid the flowerings of musical post-modernism is anyone’s guess. Actually the programme is rather cunningly devised, with only one serious lapse of taste (superimposing the sound of bells over the best of the Pärt pieces, Annum per annum). The two organs used are superlative (the historical Ebert organ of the Hofkirche, Innsbruck, in particular) and the playing exemplary. This disc will seize neither the emotions nor the intellect, but it will beguile for a moment, and what, in the end, is wrong with that? William Whitehead