Arvo Pärt: Piano Music

2011 / Arvo Pärt’s piano works range from his first public statement as a composer, the Zwei Sonatinen, to his latest, the life-affirming miniature Für Anna Maria. Moving away from his 1960s atonal language, Pärt found an essence of truth in music embodied in the simple lines of Für Alina. Lamentate is a vast monument which the composer has described as a lament ‘not for the dead, but for the living’. Multi award-winning pianist Ralph van Raat has been praised for his ‘sensitive and technically refined’ playing of Hans Otte’s Book of Sounds (8572444) (MusicWeb International).