Tag: Arvo Part

Choral Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Criticism

Estonians Play Their Pärt

Estonian Festival Orchestra, Credit Fadi Kheir
Carnegie Hall’s Arvo Pärt festival began with the Estonian Festival Orchestra, violin soloists Midori and Hans Christian Aavik and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. (Photo credit Fadi Kheir)

In listening to a three-hour concert of music by Arvo Pärt, the brilliance of the Estonian composer’s craft becomes clear. His use of percussion is a masterclass in orchestration, announcing the beginning of a piece with a chime, punctuating string passages with a ding or a gong, and clamorous timpani rolls in rare fortissimo moments.

This all-Pärt concert on October 23 was the first program in a season-long celebration of the 90-year old composer at Carnegie Hall. Pärt holds the Composer’s Chair at Carnegie this season (that’s the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair, to you). The occasion was also the American debut of the Estonian Festival Orchestra, founded in 2011 by Paavo Järvi, who conducted this performance.

Much of Pärt’s music is deceptively simple: descending scales, modest melodies repeated over and over, block chords and spare orchestration. He is a master of form as well, building a clear emotional arc in every composition, playing on extreme dynamic markings. This was deftly demonstrated by the Estonians, with pianissimo passages that were barely perceptible and subtle shades of softness, holding thunderous fortes for special moments. Another effective technique is his unabashed use of silence – in such a patient way that there is no compulsion to jump in and fill the void.

Only one work on this program reminded me why I have avoided listening to Pärt’s music for many years. The second movement of Tabula Rasa, one of the longest works on the program, was an exercise in restraint. Slow and repetitious without forward motion, it ultimately was tedious and boring. The way this music stopped time seemed to resonate with many in the audience, just not me. Besides that, the performance, which featured two violin soloists – veteran Midori and young upstart Hans Christian Aavik – was a remarkable and compelling work.

Some of the other works performed this evening surprised me with their varied sounds and compelling forward motion, both melodically and harmonically. This was not how I thought of Pärt’s compositional style.

The last piece on the program, Credo, was by far the most interesting and varied. Interspersing JS Bach’s Prelude No. 1 on solo piano (played by Nico Muhly) between Pärt-ian passages, some bellicose, some tender, was exciting.

The Estonians also brought along the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, who performed Adams Lament with the orchestra before being joined by the Trinity Choir for Credo. The combined choirs showed off their special sound in the encore, Pärt’s Estonian Lullaby.

WQXR-FM broadcast the concert on its Carnegie Hall Live series, and it is available for on demand listening at WQXR.org.

Carnegie Hall’s celebration of Arvo Pärt continues throughout the season. Upcoming events, beginning with tonight’s Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir are listed at this link.

by Gail Wein
Choral Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, early music, File Under?

The Sixteen at St. Mary’s (Concert Review)

The Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers

The Deer’s Cry

Miller Theatre Early Music Series at Church of St. Mary the Virgin

Saturday, October 26, 2024

 

NEW YORK – This past Saturday, renowned British vocal ensemble The Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers, made their Miller Theatre Early Music Series debut. Presented at Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown, the group performed music from their latest recording on Coro, The Deer’s Cry. Consisting of works by English Renaissance composer William Byrd (1540-1623) and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (1935-), this seemingly eclectic pairing worked well together. Christophers may often be economical in his gestures, but he elicits a beautiful sound and detailed approach from The Sixteen. St. Mary’s is a wonderfully resonant space in which to sing, allowing the ensemble to be shown to its best advantage.

 

Byrd was a recusant Catholic, refusing to join the Church of England at a time when his own faith was frequently persecuted. He was fortunate to have the most influential patron one could hope for: Queen Elizabeth. She gave Byrd and his older colleague Thomas Tallis exclusive rights to publish music in England, and for the most part was able to shield Byrd from the authorities. Some of the biblical texts he set, such as Ab Dominum cum tribular, heard on The Sixteen’s program, were repurposed to comment on the tenuous position of Catholicism in England. 

 

The Sixteen presented a number of Byrd’s Latin motets. The composer delighted in learned devices such as canon. The evening’s opener, the eight-voice motet Diliges Dominum, features a “crab canon,” one in which the tune is designed to be performed forwards and backwards. This complex concoction likely delighted the composer, and was notated in customary fashion, with a poem indicating how to realize the canon; a code to crack for the performers. Miserere nostri is a collaboration between Tallis and Byrd, in which four lines were written by Byrd and another three by Tallis. Once again, canonic procedures are utilized, this time dealing with proportional lengths of melodic  lines and intervallic inversion. Ab Dominum cum tribularer uses imitative motives that move throughout its eight parts to create a contrapuntal web. Christe qui lux es et dies takes a different approach, alternating chant and chordal passages, demonstrating Byrd’s capacity to create a simple, yet poignant, motet as well. 

 

The program’s title work, by Pärt, is a setting of a modern English translation of the Irish prayer also known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate. There is a sustained soprano line with harmony in blocks in the men’s voices. Partway through, all the voices join in a rousing tutti, followed by a long decrescendo to conclude. The Sixteen sings with an extraordinary capacity for dynamic control and nuance, which was amply demonstrated here. Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis, the text a part of the evening prayer service, uses his signature tintinnabuli (bells) style, where some singers perform mostly linear chant-like melodies and others arpeggiate triads, creating both moments of consonance and dissonance in turn. Nunc Dimittis overlaps a number of parts, creating what feels like an entire set of cathedral bells pealing. The Woman With the Alabaster Box recounts the story from the Gospel of Luke, where a woman anoints Jesus’s head with expensive ointment. The disciples object to this opulent gesture, but Jesus tells them that it is appropriate.Here, the musical language is sparer, even severe in the dialogue between Jesus and the disciples. Perhaps Pärt agrees with the commentators who suggest that the anointing is, metaphorically, a preparation for Jesus’s death. The three selections by the Estonian composer showed the multiplicity of elements in his music, a vivid palette that too often has been mislabeled “holy minimalism.”

 

The concert program concluded with Byrd’s Tribue domine, an elaborate six-voice setting of a prayer of supplication, in which there is much alternation between different portions of the ensemble and tutti singing. The encore was Vigilate. which The Sixteen recorded for A Watchful Gaze (2023), another album focused on Byrd’s music. Taken at a brisk tempo with a thrilling conclusion, The Sixteen and Christopher’s rendition of Vigilate was the most dramatically intense performance of Byrd I have ever heard. An untoppable conclusion to their first visit to St. Mary’s under the auspices of Miller Theatre. One hopes they return regularly. 

 

Christian Carey

Sequenza21

 

by Christian Carey
CDs, Chamber Music, Concert review, File Under?, Violin

Gidon Kremer at McCarter

KREMER_TOP2

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica

McCarter Theatre Center

Friday, February 3, 2017

By Christian Carey

 

PRINCETON – I’ve wanted to hear violinist Gidon Kremer perform Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s iconic work Fratres live since I was a teenager. Back then, Kremer’s rendition of the work on an ECM Records New Series CD was transfixing and game changing: it became an almost totemic art object for me as a composition student. On February 3rd, I got my wish at McCarter Theatre in Princeton. Unlike the recording, here Kremer pushed the proceedings forward, taking a quicker tempo and engaging in more taut phrasing than he did on the CD. The work is still transfixing, but it was moving to hear its story retold in a new way.

 

Kremer and Kremerata Baltica, the chamber orchestra of Eastern European musicians that he leads, have a new ECM CD out, this one of the Chamber Symphonies of Mieczysław Weinberg, late works that sit astride Mahlerian late Romanticism and modernism that is a close cousin to the works of Shostakovich. Clarinetist Mate Bekavac, who also appears on the recording, was a sterling-toned soloist, unwinding breathless phrases and coordinating and blending seamlessly with the strings.

 

The second half of the concert had an interested concept that provided a bit of dramatic flair. Kremer began it with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade Melancolique, leaving the stage on the last note, which led directly into Kremerata Baltica’s rendition of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. This was resolutely played, but the absence of brass and winds led to some strangely attenuated passages (Andrei Pushkarev, a percussionist, performed formidable gymnastics to reach all of the score’s instruments). At the piece’s conclusion, Kremer returned to the stage, playing Valentin Silvestrov’s solo Serenade nearly attacca.

 

There were yet more surprises to come. Two encores, Stankovich’s Lullaby and Alfred Schnittke’s Polka gave the audience distinct flavors of music-making – one poignant and one buoyant – to send them home.

 

This is Kremer’s seventieth birthday year. To celebrate, he has not only released the Weinberg disc on ECM, but has also recorded Rachmaninov’s Piano Trios and the Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto (available on vinyl!) for DG.

kremer trios

 

glass kremer

by Christian Carey
Birthdays, CDs, Choral Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Los Angeles, Minimalism

Happy 75th Birthday Arvo Pärt

 Arvo Pärt: Symphony No. 4

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa Pekka Salonen conductor
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tõnu Kaljuste conductor

Symphony No. 4 “Los Angeles” (2008)
Fragments from Kanon Pokajanen (1997)

ECM New Series 2160

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt turned 75 yesterday. His record label ECM Records is celebrating his three-quarters of a century with two new recordings.

Pärt’s 4th Symphony is a long-anticipated follow-up to his 3rd – which was written back in 1971! In the interim, the composer has moved from a modernist style to an idiosyncratic version of minimalism; one the composer calls the “tintinnabuli” style of composition. From bell-like resonances and slowly moving chant melodies, Pärt has crafted a personal compositional language of considerable appeal. And while this has included a number of stirring instrumental works, such as Tabula Rasa and Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, more recently Pärt has been known for his choral music. His return to symphonic form is thus an opportunity to explore his mature language in a different milieu.

Perhaps in part as an acknowledgement of the home of the orchestra commissioning the Fourth Symphony – the “City of Angels” – Pärt decided to use a text as a formative – if subliminal – device in his preparations of the piece: the Canon of the Guardian Angel. Thus, while this is certainly not merely a transcription of a vocal piece – it sounds idiomatic and well orchestrated – there is a certain chant-like quality which demonstrates the symphony’s affinity with the vocal music and chant texts that are Pärt’s constant companions.

The live recording is of the work’s premiere in Disney Hall in LA. Salonen and the LA Phil give a muscular rendition of the piece, emphasizing its emphatic gestures while still allowing for the symphony’s many reflective, meditative oases to have considerably lustrous resonance. And while one can certainly hear a palpable connection to Pärt’s chant-inspired tintinnabuli pieces, the symphony also allows for dissonant verticals and melodic sweep that recalls both Pärt’s own Third Symphony and the works of other 20th century symphonists, from Gorecki to Shostakovich.

Perhaps in order to clearly attest to the connection between text and symphony, the disc is balanced out with a fifteen-minute serving of fragments from one of his important choral works from the 1990s: Kanon Pokajanen. The composer has pointed out the relationship between the canon that was his reference point for the symphony and the texts upon which the latter choral work was based.

He says, “To my mind, the two works form a stylistic unity and belong together. I wanted to give the words an opportunity to choose their own sound. The result, which even caught me by surprise, was a piece wholly pervaded by this special Slavonic diction found only in church texts. It was the canon that clearly showed me how strongly choice of language preordains a work’s character.”

Kaljuste and the Estonian Chamber Choir are seasoned handlers of Pärt’s works, having made a number of recordings of his music. They do not disappoint here, providing a performance that juxtaposes the ethereal eternity found in the texts with an earthy and corporeally passionate rendering of the music.

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In order to further fete Pärt, ECM also plans a lush reissue of their landmark 1984 recording, Tabula Rasa, complete with a generous accompanying book with newly commissioned essays about the composer.

by Christian Carey
Choral Music, File Under?

Some Eastern European Music for Easter


One of the grand things about teaching at Westminster Choir College is simply walking across campus. A choral ensemble always seems to be rehearsing – sometimes more than one. Last year, I got to hear some absolutely thrilling rehearsals of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s music: both the Te Deum and Berlin Mass. Above is one of my favorite movements from the piece. A bright E major essay that’s both zesty & syncopated, its guaranteed to help turn the corner from bleak Winter to blossoming Spring, and, for church goers, from the stations of Passion Week to the hopeful promise of Easter. Whether one is of a secular or spiritual bent, Pärt here seems to be a postmodern corollary to that other piece in E major that signifies Spring, by Antonio somebody… (grin)

by Christian Carey