Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra bring perfection and purity to Arvo Pärt at Carnegie Hall
United States Pärt: Midori (violin), Hans Christian Aavik (violin), Nico Muhly (piano), Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Trinity Choir, Estonian Festival Orchestra / Paavo Järvi (conductor). Carnegie Hall, New York, 23.10.2025. (RP)
Pärt – Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Perpetuum mobile, La Sindone, Adam’s Lament, Tabula rasa, Fratres, Swansong, Credo
Carnegie Hall, along with much of the musical world, is celebrating Arvo Pärt who turned 90 on 11 September. Pärt has retired from public life and is no longer composing, but he remains one of the world’s most-performed living composers. His music has an appeal that spans twenty-first-century aesthetics to alternative rock musicians. Carnegie Hall bestowed the 2025–2026 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair on Pärt and is presenting his music in concerts throughout the season.
The celebration began with Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra in its US debut. Järvi founded both the festival and the orchestra in 2011 in part to champion Estonian music, especially the country’s composers. Few, if any, musicians in the world are as familiar with Pärt’s music as Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra. They performed what amounted to the greatest hits list of the composer’s works with equal parts authority and devotion.
The first work, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, was written in 1977 for string orchestra and tubular bell. Pärt had no real connection with Britten but longed to meet him and was profoundly moved by his death the prior year. Cantus is composed in Pärt’s tintinnabuli, or little bells, style. It also incorporates silence – Pärt’s ‘treasured handmaiden to sound’ – which is as integral to the composer’s style as bells.
Järvi commanded stillness in the hall to precede the three strokes of the chime which begin the work. Over the sustained crescendo that is the crux of the piece, the orchestra produced soft, transparent sounds that resonated with warmth. This simplest of music, a descending A-minor scale pierced by the random chimes played at different speeds by the orchestra, cast a solemn spirituality that extended after the final chimes had sounded.
Two other short works followed: Perpetuum mobile which dates from 1963 and La Sindone, a 2005 piece that is a musical reflection on the Shroud of Turin. Järvi drew a long crescendo from the orchestra in Perpetuum mobile which climaxed in horrifying sounds shot through by the flutes’ shrill cries. The mayhem collapsed into silence with the crash of a cymbal, which was followed by the silence that Järvi once again could command. Further attempts would not always be as successful with this enthusiastic and restive audience.
Although La Sindone is a twenty-first-century work, its rich orchestration hearkens back to Pärt’s earlier compositional style. Järvi drew vivid sonorities from the orchestra, with particularly expressive playing from the strings, to evoke the mysteries associated with the piece of cloth revered as a relic of Jesus Christ. There were periods of silence and the tolling of bells, but this was a far different sonic environment from the composer’s works in the tintinnabuli style with its driving rhythms, trumpet calls and the rattle of the snare drum.
Composed in 2009, Pärt’s Adam’s Lament had its Carnegie Hall premiere in 2014 with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallinn Chamber Orchestra conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste. It is a setting of meditations on the Fall of Adam by St. Silouan (1866-1938), a Russian Orthodox monk who at 27 joined the community of Mount Athos in Greece. Set for choir and orchestra, Pärt described Adam’s fall and its consequences, including his son Cain’s slaying of his brother Abel, as representing ‘humankind in its entirety and each individual person alike’.
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir was once again at Carnegie Hall giving voice to Pärt’s stolid, Orthodox-style chant. The men’s voices resonated profoundly in their lower ranges, while those of the women etched their lines with crystalline clarity. Voices clashed in exquisite dissonances as penetrating as they were pure, and strings alternated between ethereal sounds and massive chordal slabs. The final lines of the piece were a plea for humility and love from the chorus and orchestra.
Composed in 1977, Tabula rasa has two movements, ‘Ludus’ and ‘Silentium’, and is a double concerto for two solo violins, prepared piano and chamber orchestra. Järvi led an unforgettable performance of this masterwork which featured not only Midori but also the amazing, rising violinist Hans Christian Aavik. Composer-pianist Nico Muhly playing the prepared piano part was the icing on the cake.
Born in Tallinn in 1998, Aavik cuts a dashing figure and plays with technical bravura. He is a master of the sweeping gesture as well as emotive playing, with a singing tone that flows from his instrument. Midori, the epitome of elegance as always, dug into Pärt’s churning repetitive figure with a gutsy determination that was equally fascinating to watch and hear. This was a study in contrasts that worked brilliantly.
The spellbinding music of the second movement was made even more so with Muhly’s playing of the unearthly arpeggios that sound throughout it. Only one thing marred the performance – the applause after the first movement when its composer requested silence.
Aavik and Midori returned for an encore, Pårt’s Passacaglia in its 2007 arrangement for two violins, vibraphone and string orchestra. They vied with each other in virtuosity, camaraderie and ethereal harmonics. There was some particularly fiery pizzicato playing from Midori, and Aavik commanded attention with his presence and passion. Each repetition of the theme started afresh with energy and wit, which unfortunately had to come to an end.
Fratres, also composed in 1977, is familiar from many film scores. Composed in the tintinnabuli style, Pärt wrote it without fixed instrumentation. Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra gave it the full deluxe treatment where rhythm vied with melody. Swansong is Pärt’s 2013 orchestration of a sung piece inspired by a text by Cardinal John Henry Newman. Words were hardly necessary to convey Newman’s expression of faith which a solo bassoon did most eloquently. It is a joyous piece full of melodies and bell-like sounds that ended with the musical equivalent of a sprinkling of fairy dust.
The premiere of Credo in 1968, conducted by Neeme Järvi, Paavo’s father, marked a turning point in Pärt’s career. It was deemed an affront to the Soviet regime and banned for ten years. This reaction prompted Pärt’s eight-year hiatus from composing and was the catalyst for him and his family to leave Soviet-occupied Estonia in 1980.
To perform Pärt’s exploration of good versus evil, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir joined forces with New York’s Trinity Choir. The opening statements of the prayer – ‘Credo’ or ‘I believe’ – were soft and mesmerizing, but then Järvi unleashed the full power of the choir and orchestra, which wowed. It was a performance marked with intensity and drama where soft lyricism yielded to wild blasts of sound. Muhly was back on the stage at the piano, this time as a member of the orchestra, not as a soloist playing some heavenly snippets of Bach’s Prelude in C major. In the final measures, after two massive outbursts of ‘Credo’ from the choir, the chaos gave way to sublimity.
An elated Järvi bent into the celebratory mood by conducting Pärt’s Estonian Lullaby as an encore. The arrangement of a traditional folk song for women’s voices and string orchestra was commissioned by Jordi Savall in 2002 for his ensemble, Hespèrion XXI. The composer wrote that ‘Lullabies are like little pieces of lost Paradise’. It was heaven indeed.
Rick Perdian
Featured Image: Hans Christian Aavik (violin), Midori (violin), Paavo Järvi (conductor), Nico Muhly (piano), and the Estonian Festival Orchestra © Fadi Kheir
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