From 19 to 29 May, the festival “Mozart & Pärt” will be held in Los Angeles, California, USA. The festival focuses on the music of Arvo Pärt, in a performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and its principal conductor Gustavo Dudamel. Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (EPCC) will take part in four concerts from 19 to 22 May at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Alongside the Latvian Radio Choir and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir will perform Pärt’s Miserere and Mozart’s Requiem. The soloist cast includes the soprano Lucy Crowe, the mezzo-soprano Roxana Constantinescu, the tenor Paul Appleby, the tenor Frederick Ballentine and the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni.
Arvo Pärt’s works will feature at a total of ten concerts in Los Angeles, in addition to works by Mozart, Handel, Bill Viola (video/sound/installation), and others.
In 26 and 27 May, Pärt’s works Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten and Symphony No. 4 “Los Angeles” will be performed at a concert titled “The Angels”. Symphony No. 4 was co-commissioned by the LA Philharmonic and its former music director Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2008, which can be considered as the beginning of the collaboration between the composer and the orchestra.
The festival will culminate on May 28, with a world première of Greater Antiphons for string orchestra by Arvo Pärt, commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel. The second performance will be on May 29. (The premiere in Europe will be at the Malta International Arts Festival in 8–18 July.)
The closing concert of the festival will take place on May 29, with Pärt’s organ pieces performed by the organists Aaron David Miller and Damin Spritzer.
EPCC has a long tradition of touring in the USA. The first concerts were given in 1990 and since then the choir has been over Atlantic for fourteen successful tours, but this is the first time on the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall. As there is a constant growing interest towards EPCC, Arvo Pärt’s music as well as other Estonian composers, during the last years the tours have been arranged each season, and they have included performances in the most prestigious concert venues – Kennedy Center in Washington, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The USA tours have been organised in cooperation with the EPCC’s long term partner, agency New World Classics.
Further information about the festival: http://www.laphil.com/mozartandpart