Arvo Pärt, Peter Maxwell Davies, Philip Glass, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent

Trivium is an organ recital by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, built around three composers: Arvo Pärt, Peter Maxwell Davies and Philip Glass. Four Pärt pieces open the disc, two short Maxwell Davies voluntaries stand at its centre, and two large Glass works close it. Bowers-Broadbent had already played the organ on Pärt's Arbos for ECM New Series, and Pari Intervallo appears on both albums. At the time he was organist and choirmaster of Gray's Inn Chapel in London and professor of organ at the Royal Academy of Music.

The recording was made in October 1990 at the Grossmünster in Zürich and released in April 1992. Manfred Eicher produced it, Peter Laenger was the engineer, and Bowers-Broadbent wrote the booklet notes himself. The organ version of the Satyagraha finale was transcribed and edited by Michael Riesman. The cover image comes from Jean-Luc Godard's film Passion.

The title piece dates from 1976 and is one of the first works in Pärt's tintinnabuli style; it was premiered in Tallinn that October by Rolf Uusväli. Its three short sections share one melody and treat it in three different ways, and the Latin title refers to three paths leading to a single destination. Annum per annum was written in 1980 for the 950th anniversary of Speyer Cathedral. It is an organ Mass in five sections marked K, G, C, S and A after the parts of the Ordinary. Mein Weg hat Gipfel und Wellentäler (1989) takes its title from a poem by Edmond Jabès. Maxwell Davies's two pieces from 1976 are arrangements of sixteenth-century Scottish music, and Glass's Dance IV, at fifteen and a half minutes, is the longest work on the disc.

Writing on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo heard the opening Trivium as "a constellation burning silently for our scrutiny," and wrote that the steady pulse of Mein Weg "breathes with earthly lungs." For him Dance IV "ecstatically forms the center of the album's galactic structure." Pärt later arranged Mein Weg for strings and percussion, a version heard on the ECM album In Principio.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1431, first released in 1992.