Here, Arvo Pärt raises his head.

Die Presse 

20 Oct 2025

                    BY JENS F. LAURSON

After an extensive Pärt summer in his hometown of Pärnu, the Estonian Festival Orchestra is touring the world with Pärt's music.

On Friday evening, the RSO gave a taste of Arvo Pärt at the Konzerthaus, and the following evening, the Estonian Festival Orchestra delivered the full package: just Pärt, ten works (including encores), lasting over two and a half hours. What would be a threat with other living composers and result in an empty house, is the opposite with Pärt. It was a joy – and the Great Hall was sold out.

"Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten" (1977) sounds like a Shepard scale descending in increasing intensity – and was the opening piece for the orchestra, which has its headquarters in the picturesque Hanseatic seaside town of Pärnu, a stone's throw from the Baltic Sea coast. In "Perpetuum mobile" (1963), a short, cheeky piece, Pärt summons his inner George Antheil: First, he lets all his collected musical and rhythmic forces pile up in a squealing heap – then, after the crash, only a stray hubcap seems to bump across the road. "La Sindone" (2002), on the other hand, is almost a late work of great inner calm, drooping sighs, and a final struggle.

Of course, the EFO wouldn't have embarked on a Pärt tour without the "Greatest Hits": before the interval, the double concerto "Tabula Rasa," followed by the multi-recordable "Fratres," here in the version for string orchestra and percussion. Both are showcase works of Pärt's "tintinnabuli" style, composed in 1977, and were thrust into the spotlight in the West by ECM's first album in the "New Series."

The soloists in "Tabula Rasa" were the duo of Midori and Hans Christian Aavik, while Kalle Randalu gleefully plucked the prepared piano, sounding like a cimbalom on steroids. Even half a century after its creation, the music has lost little of its fascination and develops an immense pull. At the end, when even the soloists are silent, only the solo cellist and solo double bassist remain at work – whispering notes. It's astonishing that this was only the third performance of this Pärt evergreen in the history of the Konzerthaus.

According to the last count, there are at least 18 versions of the shifting "Fratres" for various instruments in a wide variety of combinations. The work, dedicated to the Estonian composer Eduard Tubin, fuses apparent standstill and hectic activity into a hypnotic whole, although in this version, without a soloist, the hecticness is quite subliminal. The "Swansong" swam through the Konzerthaus again, as it had the previous evening, and was once again welcome, albeit somewhat more lively here.

Apart from the encore, the concert closed with "Credo" – the work with which, one could say, it all began. It was less Pärt's breakthrough than an escape: a reckoning with serial composition and other ideological precepts. It raises its completely unruly, wild mane, building up to a pure orgy of noise, so that one seems to hear the Old Testament God himself, before finally arriving at a conciliatory end with the words "do not resist him who does you harm." A sublime conclusion to a wonderful concert.