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| Arvo Pärt |
Another article on Arvo Pärt on the occasion of his 90th birthday, this one rather better than the one in the NYT a couple of weeks ago: Arvo Pärt: the holy minimalist who defied the Soviets
Arvo Pärt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion and purity of Gregorian plainchant and Renaissance church chorale, though it could only have been written today, being at once archaic and abstract-modern. With its sense of stasis and light, the music reflects the immensity of the Baltic landscape and Estonia’s own forested plains. Under communism, Pärt fell foul of the Soviet censors as his music defied official atheism. His work is shaped by his Eastern Orthodox faith; it is a form of prayer.
One cannot miss the parallels with the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, whose music is also a form of prayer.
Pärt emerged from his silence with the exquisite piano composition Für Alina. Often used in films today to conjure a mood of sadness, Für Alina was music distilled to its purest essence and the first piece in Pärt’s new musical style of tintinnabuli. The compositions now began to pour out of him. Tabula Rasa, a landmark in 20th-century music, premiered at Tallinn’s Polytechnic Institute in September 1977 and reportedly left the audience speechless. The clanging of the prepared piano (achieved by inserting screws between its strings) showed the anti-classical influence of John Cage.
Composers throughout the ages have used ‘models’, have paid homage to their imperishable predecessors in ways that are more often than not loving tributes: think Josquin’s Déploration sur la mort de Jean Ockeghem, Mozart’s very early piano concertos that are unabashed ‘arrangements’ of Johann Christian Bach, or Alban Berg’s Violinkonzert ‘Dem Andenken eines Engels’. Much of what is being written today is, however, merely derivative; betraying a lack of courage or of vision, straining our faith in music as an art-form with any future at all. Much contemporary art qualifies, indeed, barely as ‘entertainment’ any more, for it has been hijacked by the ‘addiction-directed’ processes of the internet, whose attention span is measured not even in minutes, but in seconds.
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It is hard to envy the life of a contemporary concert soloist: A VIOLINIST’S LIFE IN THE AIR
This has been quite the past 30 hours! My crazy travel day started with an incident on my United flight from Indianapolis to Houston, when some poor guy had a mental break and ran up to the front of the plane just as we were about to land and pulled open the emergency door (luckily he was subdued before he could throw himself out, so he is, as far as I know, OK).
We sat on the tarmac surrounded by police and firefighters for a couple of hours, I managed to get to my connecting flight to Buenos Aires ♂️but they told me it was closed. I begged, they relented, but of course they had given away my lovely business class seat so I spent the next 9.5 hours in 43D. 1 hour of sleep on the flight, 1 hour spent at Buenos Aires airport filing a claim for my lost suitcase, arrive at hotel 11AM, sleep until 1:30PM, find a clothing store, purchase an entire concert outfit in 30 minutes (that’s my kind of shopping), quick lunch, rehearsal at 4:30PM, Beethoven Concerto at 8PM with Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and Riccardo Minasi at the incomparable Teatro Colón, post concert dinner at the most beautiful home of our wonderful presenters @mozarteumargentino_ , back to hotel 1AM. Pickup tomorrow at 7AM to head to Montevideo!
But that was what I worked hard to try to achieve in my career!
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Now for some envois. It seems forever since we have had something from Gustav Holst. Here is Mars from The Planets:
Here is the Symphony No. 9 by Valentin Silvestrov:
And finally, some not well-known Handel, an Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, 1713:
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