Orange Mountain Music is pleased to announce the availability of a new album of music by Arvo Pärt, the most performed and celebrated composer alive. Building on the legacy of recordings that OMM has created in collaboration with the celebrated Bruckner Orchester Linz and conductor Dennis Russell Davies, this new recording features soloist Maki Namekawa performing the Pärt masterpiece Lamentate from 2002 for piano and orchestra. The piece was composed as an homage to Anish Kapoor and his sculpture Marsyas and was the piece selected by Philip Glass to be performed alongside the American premiere of his Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall as part of Glass’s 75th birthday celebration on 31 January 2012. Lamentate may be scored for piano and orchestra, but it is not a de facto piano concerto. The New York Times reported that Lamentate is a ’meditation on mortality, or as Mr. Pärt put it in his program note - the pain and hopelessness of the world.’ Unusual fare for a birthday concert, perhaps, but the score has ample attractions, including lustrous, hypnotic string writing, a recurring and disquieting distant timpani rumbling and a graceful piano part often a single, singing line played with understated eloquence by Maki Namekawa.

It was decided immediately after that 2012 concert to record this masterwork for OMM. An opportunity didn’t present itself until early 2016 when Davies and the Bruckner Orchester Linz, towards the final months of Davies’s 15-year-long tenure as music director, decided to enter the studio to record both Lamentate and These Words... for string orchestra and percussion. The writer Eric Marinitsch described the 17-minute tone poem this way: ‘These Words... uses the human foibles mentioned in the old Church Slavonic prayer from the Canon to the Guardian Angel, while the title derives from associations between this material and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.’