An evening of spellbinding performances that made the Estonian composer’s music glow
Soprano Maria Listra performing at the Barbican Hall in celebration of Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday Credit: Mark Allan
Estonian Philharmonic Orchestra, Barbican
The worldwide fame of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt – the most popular living classical composer after John Williams – is a comforting reminder that integrity still matters. This concert in honour of his 90th birthday by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra focused on five mature masterpieces, offering wonderful performances which made the music’s austere geometry and ritualistic repetitions glow.
Pärt didn’t achieve enduring popularity by becoming an imitation American minimalist or wannabe film composer. He followed his own vision, though it took years to come into focus. His early works married ear-bending modernism and his Christian faith, a combination which did not please the Soviet cultural commissars. Not until his 40s did Pärt find his true voice.
Two of the pieces performed at the Barbican were his well-known hits. The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bells seemed to issue from the skies, descending in gossamer-thin melodic lines in violins which were imitated at progressively slower speeds in the lower strings. One became aware of an inscrutable process unfolding and gaining in power and heft.
The renowned Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in Copenhagen in 2008 Credit: Kristian Juul Pedersen/AFP via Getty Images
Conductor Tõnu Kaljuste controlled the crescendo through to the final immense chord with an unerring hand. He showed a similar sure hand in Fratres, another aloof process, this time overlaid with rhapsodic solo violin melodies beautifully played by Harry Traksman, and punctuated with iron fatefulness by bass drum and wood blocks.
Less familiar were the three pieces based on sacred texts. In L’abbé Agathon soprano Maria Listra told the story of the hermit who responds to a leper’s many requests for help, while the female voices of the choir and the strings provided both a glowing commentary and an architectural frame – like those medieval paintings where a miracle takes place among serried ranks of angels. Eventually the hermit discovers that the leper was actually an angel in disguise, a tale told by Listra in an ascending phrase which seemed to vanish as it rose. It was the evening’s best moment.
That feeling of solemn patterns and symmetries framing a story recurred in Adam’s Lament, which imagines Adam’s grief after he has been expelled from Eden. As in the final piece, the Latin prayer Te Deum, the small signs of Pärt’s genius are tucked away in music that at first seems less individual than those well-known pieces.
But their brilliance was soon revealed, because the performances made those small signs shine out with such lovely clarity – especially those long-held clashes between neighbouring notes, which in other composers sound tense but in Pärt’s music feel somehow serene. It was truly an evening of musical miracles, which held us all spellbound.
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