A "holy minimalist" Arvo Pärt may be, but there's nothing at all minimalist about Como cierva sedienta. Here is Pärt with trumpets, drums, and drama, even if the composer's basically deliberate and meditative personality is never really submerged. This half-hour work for women's chorus, soprano, and orchestra is Pärt's first in the Spanish language (it was commissioned for the 1999 Canary Islands Music Festival). It conflates the texts of Psalms 42 and 43 in a much-simplified, modern Spanish translation (from a volume called Dios habla hoy) of the psalm texts beginning with a line generally rendered in English as "As the hart panteth after the water brooks." There are five sections, several of them framed by instrumental interludes, and the text prayerfully returns three times to the verse beginning "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" "'My soul' in David's Psalm is the soul of us all, our path through life—a path filled with suffering and drama, a path between consolation and ultimate despair, a path that may lead to a battle with God, yet a path filled with longing for Him," wrote the composer, and it is the strong implication of narrative contained in these words that seems to have called forth a newly dramatic language from Pärt. In its extended tonality and cool but reverential manner, the work at times evokes both Britten's choral music and even Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, but it's a bit grander than either of these, with harps and big climaxes.

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