A Celebration Of Pärt, With Järvi ‘Dynasty’ Of Conductors On Podium
Classical Voice America
PÄRNU, Estonia — Arvo Pärt, the most-performed living composer, once famously said, “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.”
In the case of this year’s Pärnu Music Festival, many notes were beautifully played, but none more so than the quintessential notes written by Pärt in this 2025 edition honoring the Estonian composer’s 90th birthday on Sept. 11. And lest you think that the festival was entwined in melancholic commemorations and soulful laments, revise your thinking. This 15th Pärnu festival, which runs July 16-25, has delivered a cornucopia of both quietly spiritual and exuberant performances from Pärt to familiar and other living composers. Many will linger long in the memory.
The festival’s title, Credo — chosen in honor of Pärt’s seminal composition of the same name — acknowledges the work as a turning point in both the composer’s career and its connections to the festival’s originators. Pärt’s career is inextricably and significantly associated with the so-called Järvi dynasty of conductors: patriarch Neeme and sons Paavo and Kristjan.
In 1968, Neeme Järvi premiered Credo with the Estonian Television and Radio Mixed Choir, the Estonian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, and pianist Mart Lille in a dramatic event that saw the piece subsequently banned by Soviet officials for its religious and political provocations. In 2010, Paavo Järvi premiered the orchestral work Silhouette in his former role as chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris. Indeed, Pärt composed the work specifically for Paavo out of respect for the inspiration he offered in his interpretations of other Pärt works. And in a unique offering at the 2025 Pärnu festival, Nordic Pulse, Kristjan Järvi’s reimagining of Pärt’s seminal scores in an electronic mélange, reflects an inimitable homage.
The music festival is set in Estonia’s official summer capital, Pärnu, a charming seaside destination whose status as a resort town par excellence is almost enshrined in the country’s constitution. With Pärnu’s historic 1830’s neo-classical buildings and romantic wooden villas, festivalgoers, when not attending the long sold-out concerts, have the enviable luxury of immersing themselves in a picturesque and lively town. Pärnu is also filled with family nostalgia and tradition for the Järvi family. It’s very clear, once you’ve spent a few days at this 10-day festival, that the Järvi family’s commitment to tradition and musical kinship are vital to the event’s success and longevity.
Each year, the festival hosts more than 300 musicians making up the five orchestras that range from the flagship Estonian Festival Orchestra, which is a hand-picked group of players from the world’s leading ensembles, to young groups that include the Järvi Academy Youth Orchestra, Sinfonietta, and Instrumental Academy.
For this year’s festival, fate dealt an unfortunate hand. A week before its start, Neeme Järvi, 88, took a fall at the Estonian Song Festival and could not participate. The ever-ebullient Paavo embraced the extra duties with gusto.
This 2025 festival began fittingly at the Arvo Pärt Centre, the dedicated cultural and archival venue in the woods of Laulasmaa, a peninsula on the outskirts of Tallinn, which opened in 2010. It’s here that the 21 participants in the Järvi Conducting Academy (aged 22-36), with various degrees of conducting experience, displayed their wares. It was reassuring that over a third of the participants were female. The potential was palpable.
It’s also here that audiences begin to experience the Järvi vision. The Järvi Conducting Academy speaks directly to the promise of tomorrow — tomorrow’s musicians, tomorrow’s Estonian musical legacy, and tomorrow’s audiences. It’s a strategy that values opportunity over precedence. For the uninitiated Pärnu audience member, the concert experience takes a departure. It’s a little jarring at first. Instead of each aspiring conductor taking the helm of an entire work, the participants are allocated a particular movement or movements. While this masterclass approach doesn’t offer the consummate listening experience, it’s one, after a few concerts, that you begin to appreciate for its efficacy.
In the opener, Pärt’s Greater Antiphons, the wondrously dramatic string orchestra rearrangement of the a cappella work Seven Magnificat Antiphons, was divided among the aspirants and played twice. It’s an ideal work for the conductors to realize Pärt’s quintessential techniques: Greater Antiphons is written in a rigorous tintinnabuli style. The antiphonal structure allowed the conductors to imprint their images onto the score and explore the alternating major and minor voices.
For the first concert that I attended in Pärnu, Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Brittentook opening honors. Written as an elegy to the English composer whom Pärt greatly admired but never met, the concise piece, with its framed silence, countered as a reverential, if slightly melancholic opener for the birthday celebrations. But Pärt’s introspective tribute, performed by the Academy Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi, soon made way for a light and ebullient Mozart Symphony No. 29 and a full-bodied Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony No.3.
This programming set the precedent for the festival, which contextualized Pärt. Repertoire was abundant. Contemporary compositions and premieres by Estonian composers Erkki-Sven Tüür and Elis Hallik shook hands with Bach and Stravinsky. Of the noteworthy moments of beauty — both dignified and ecstatic — cellist Marcel Johannes Kits offered elevated passion in an arrangement of Elgar’s Sospiri, while oboist Kalev Kuljus’ indefatigable virtuosity overwhelmed the audience in Tüür’s Oboe Concerto.
Nothing could have prepared you for the breathtaking, fiery, and intense performance of Stravinsky’s suite from The Firebird by the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Paavo Järvi. The conductor’s daredevil speed in the “Infernal Dance of King Kashchei” no doubt surpassed the metronome markings. But his emphatic speed could not deter this quality orchestra of virtuosic players from its mission. Neither did this intoxicating moment detract from the sublime colors in the connective tissue between the movements. The collective dynamism of the orchestra under Järvi’s majestic, composed control mesmerized the concert hall.
There is more Pärt in store for audiences outside Estonia. Fortunately for U.S. audiences, Paavo Järvi will lead the Estonian Festival Orchestra in its North American debut Oct. 23 in an all-Pärt concert at Carnegie Hall.
Comments