In September 2020 the city of Ghent mounted a celebratory cultural event under the improbably snazzy title of “OMG! Van Eyck was here”. The occasion was the completion of the eight-year renovation of Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s glorious 15th-century “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb”, the 18-panel altarpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral. To mark the event the city commissioned a new piece of music, Für Jan van Eyck, from senior Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, master of the most rarefied of religious music. Only three minutes long, it will have made up in spiritual concentration what it lacked in celebratory magnificence.
At this late-night Prom by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Für Jan van Eyck arrived for its first performance in the UK. Pärt is soon to turn 90 and this concert was one of the many birthday offerings planned around the world before the end of the year. Who could have predicted Pärt’s huge popularity in the first half of his career? After an early period pursuing complex, avant-garde techniques, Pärt withdrew from composition for eight years to re-emerge with music that was at the opposite extreme — simple and spare, almost timeless as it seems to hang in the air. His music hit a nerve among those looking for solace in today’s stressful world. The queue for standing places at 10pm for this Prom stretched half way round the Royal Albert Hall and consisted mainly of young people. No wonder various surveys have named Pärt as the most popular living composer. Barely a murmur disturbed the atmosphere in the hall. Pärt is the most private of composers, always shunning media attention, and much of his music gives the impression of being a communion with himself. He has said of being a composer, “There must be silence. You must make peace with your powerlessness.”
Each of his short pieces in this concert, none over seven minutes, was inward-looking, the distilled essence of just one or two simple ideas. A handful went further: Peace upon you, Jerusalem for women’s voices explores purity of sound; De profundis for men’s voices, performed with percussion and organ, presents a dark and increasingly intense ritual; The Deer’s Cry, one of Pärt’s best-known works, has an incantatory power, though the inner calm of his nature was never far away. The works by other composers on the programme seemed eventful by comparison, whether the extracts from Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil with its harmonic richness, or the rhythmic grip of Bach’s brief motet Ich lasse dich nicht, BWV 1165.
As for Veljo Tormis’s visceral Curse upon Iron, with its wild cries and thumping shaman drum, that was another kettle of fish entirely. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, drew cheers for its virtuoso performance of that, though the perfect poise of its Pärt was hardly less impressive. The choir will be back in the UK in October to take part in the Barbican’s “Arvo Pärt at 90” festival, timed a couple of weeks after the birthday itself. ★★★★☆