At a Barbican celebration of Arvo Pärt’s 90th, the composer’s work sounded as if it could have been written any time from last century to last week
The composer Arvo Pärt turned 90 last month but his music continues to feel ageless. At this celebratory concert at the Barbican, performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, who also celebrated at the Proms in July, you felt that the music could have been written at any time from late last century to last week.
Having said that, hearing so much of it in this programme, which featured a couple of his heftier works, I wondered whether one of the reasons why he has so often been the most performed living composer recently (he vies for top spot with the 93-year old John Williams) is that his minimalist mode of quiet desperation speaks particularly well to our age of anxiety.
There were some blessed moments of relief. After the well-known Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, where the bell tolls over entropic strings, we had the peripatetic L’abbé Agathon. Telling the tale of a hermit tested by an angel in the guise of a leper, it was vividly delivered with a crystal clear tone and French, by the soprano Maria Listra, who often folded her tone into the largely vibrato-less strings.
Listra’s slight fragility in her upper register suited the magical final moment when she climbs an ascending scale sotto voce, depicting the moment when the leper reveals his angelic nature and, it seems, takes to the skies. It’s a mystery why this piece was performed for the first time in this country, by these ensembles, only last week.
This was followed by one of Pärt’s longest single-movement works for choir and orchestra, Adam’s Lament, in which the men take up the role of the remorseful first man. Less concentrated musically, and so less potent, it does show Pärt employing a whole spectrum of string effects — spectral harmonics to fingerboard-snapping pizzicato — to bring this lengthy text to life. Some of the tenor lines were also touchingly tender.
Longer still was this concert’s final offering, a setting of the Te Deum. Less lively than most but musically tight, it occasionally bursts into major-key sunshine which the choir’s warm, extremely well-centred tone and impeccable internal balance made especially radiant. The drone and tundra winds piped through the speakers felt like a bit of a misstep and, sounding a little Y2K, dated the piece.
Before that was the enduring Fratres, in a version for solo violin, string orchestra and percussion. The soloist, the orchestral leader Harry Traksmann, slowly warmed up to the limelight, looping and leaping gazelle-like over the shifting hymn. But in the midst of much darkness, the evening’s real, light-giving gem was the serenade Vesper by Ester Mägi, Pärt’s teacher. In a slightly warmer idiom, it sounded like a pleasing amalgam of string pieces by Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams.
★★★★☆
Vaata veel: The Times