Alexander Boldachev released his album Credo on Sept. 12, making his debut on the Pentatone label. The album is available from Pentatone as a CD, LP, and digital download and via streaming platforms.
In a social media post, Boldachev explained that the two composers featured on the album are 250 years apart—Estonian composer Arvo Pärt celebrated his 90th birthday on Sept. 11, 2025, and this year also marks 340 years since the birth of J.S. Bach. “[The album] is a cultural attempt to connect through the harp these two geniuses, with their [sacred] minimalism and maximalism in music,” Boldachev says on social media. In his liner notes for the album, Boldachev says Bach and Pärt share several musical similarities, including “profound structural thinking, a mathematical understanding of melodic and harmonic lines, and a transcendent relationship with silence and sound.”
In his liner notes, Boldachev says the concept for the album grew naturally out of his soundtrack for airplane travel, which always includes the music of Bach and Pärt. “[Their music] helps me to get into the state of flow, to break through the thoughts and stressful problems which are overwhelming my brain, and just enjoy the time tête-à-tête with the music,” he says. Gradually he began to hear the music in his head, not with the original instrumentation, but on the harp. The album features his transcriptions of four works by each composer, including Pärt’s Summa based on text from the Credo from the Catholic Mass. Boldachev says the album’s recording location in Aiglon College Chapel in Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland, further reinforced the sense of meditative space and sanctuary that he hears in this music.
Boldachev is a classical-crossover harpist, composer, initiator of World Harp Day in Hong Kong, founder of Zurich Harp Festival, and visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music and the Milano Conservatory. In 30 years onstage, he has performed in Carnegie Hall, teamed up with Robbie Williams for the FIFA World Cup Opening Ceremony, and visited hundreds of festivals from Burning Man in the USA to the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.
Check out our cover interview with Boldachev in the March-April 2017 issue of Harp Column. Learn more on his website.
