A long awaited day for those who have followed the ECM New Series catalogue. Originally issued on CD in 1999, Arvo Pärt's Alina arrives on vinyl for the very first time, more than a quarter century after its first appearance and over three decades after the sessions it preserves. For years, it has sat near the top of the list of ECM New Series titles most frequently asked after on vinyl, both by Pärt's listeners and by those who follow the imprint's contemporary classical line in its most authoritative form.

Recorded in July 1995 at Frankfurt's Festeburgkirche by engineer Markus Heiland and produced by Manfred Eicher, Alina draws together two of Pärt's most foundational compositions: Für Alina, written in 1976, and Spiegel im Spiegel, completed in 1978, shortly before the Estonian composer's departure from his country. These are the works around which the tintinnabuli style first organised itself - the triadic vocabulary of bell-like resonances and stepwise melodic lines that has since become Pärt's signature, but which here, with the composer's direct participation in the sessions, retains the deliberation and openness of a method still being discovered. The album is an act of return rather than premiere, revisiting pieces already in circulation but rendering them in what has remained, for a quarter century, the reference recording.

The album's architecture is itself a kind of prism. Vladimir Spivakov's violin and Sergej Bezrodny's piano open and close the record with two readings of Spiegel im Spiegel; a third version, for cello and piano, sits at the centre, played by Dietmar Schwalke and Alexander Malter; and two solo Für Alina renderings by Malter are positioned as inner pillars. Each phrase of Spiegel im Spiegel ascends and is answered by its descending mirror - the title means mirror in the mirror - and the structure of the record extends that principle outward, refraction containing refraction. The acoustics of the Frankfurt church return long, patient resonances around each note. The score for Für Alina calls for a calm, exalted feeling and an attention turned inward; Malter's two readings, encouraged by composer and producer to find ever new inflections of the melody, have an improvisational and reflective quality that distinguishes them from any subsequent interpretation.

Pärt's own image of his music - white light divided into colour by the prism of the listener's mind - has rarely been more literally enacted than across these five tracks, in which one piece refracts the other and repetition becomes variation. Alina moves with a stillness that defines, more than perhaps any other recording in his discography, what tintinnabuli is, and what it asks of a listener.

Issued by ECM New Series as a single LP in a cardboard sleeve with a four-page insert containing liner notes by Hermann Conen.