Carnegie Hall Throws Arvo Pärt a Party
The Wall Street Journal
ET
By
David Mermelstein
The Estonian composer, who recently turned 90 years old, was honored with two concerts devoted to his often-hypnotic music, beautifully performed by the Estonian Festival Orchestra and other ensembles from his country.
New York
Not many living composers of the concert-hall variety have carved a niche with the broader public. But Arvo Pärt, Estonian to his core, is certainly among them. In large measure that’s because Mr. Pärt’s music is always unmistakably his own. His scores, with their inherent rigor and overt religiosity, seemingly simple structure and patient exposition, conjure a world both foundational and unbound.
Mr. Pärt turned 90 years old on Sept. 11, and Carnegie Hall is marking the occasion with a significant honor, appointing him this season’s Debs Composer. Typically, the title is bestowed on someone still actively writing music, whereas Mr. Pärt retired from composition several years ago. So it’s a real sign of the esteem in which this institution holds him. That’s as it should be, for Mr. Pärt’s music was first heard at this venue in 1967, and his characteristically unhurried works have appeared on Carnegie’s programs more than 80 times since.
On Thursday and Friday, two full bills of Mr. Pärt’s music were presented—the first in Carnegie’s storied main auditorium, the second in the underground Zankel Hall, suited to smaller forces. They were the kinds of extraordinary events for which this institution is famed. Thursday’s concert, led with unyielding purposefulness by Paavo Järvi, featured the Estonian Festival Orchestra, the resident band of Mr. Järvi’s annual Pärnu Music Festival in Estonia, which this past summer saluted Mr. Pärt in a number of programs, four of them conducted by Mr. Järvi. The concert also welcomed the outstanding Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (reinforced by New York’s own Trinity Choir) and three soloists whose presence easily deserves the designation “luxury casting”: the violinists Midori and Hans Christian Aavik (a rising star and fellow Estonian) and the pianist Nico Muhly, better known as a significant American composer. (Five additional Carnegie programs this season will include music by Mr. Pärt, but none to the degree of these two.)
If Thursday’s concert, which was recorded by WQXR and can be heard online through Nov. 23, had the sense of a state occasion, with smartly dressed Estonians filling the gilded hall (among them the nation’s president and first lady), then Friday’s inherently more intimate event suggested the gathering of a secret society that brought Pärt diehards out in force. Its star attraction was Tõnu Kaljuste, a longtime champion of the composer, leading two ensembles he founded: the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra (1993) and the Estonian choir from the previous night (1981).
Both programs opened with short, focused works for string orchestra: the masterpiece “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” (which also vitally includes a bell) on Thursday and the lesser-known “Für Lennart in Memoriam,” written almost 30 years later, on Friday. The two men to which these works are dedicated—the former arguably Britain’s greatest composer, the latter a long-serving Estonian president—may not so soon pass from memory as most of us, but Mr. Pärt’s heartfelt tributes can only extend their renown. Messrs. Järvi and Kaljuste and their respective orchestras brought essential dignity to the readings and set a tone that never flagged at either concert.
The achievement should not be underestimated, because Mr. Pärt’s music, with its spare, exposed architecture, leaves no room for musicians to hide. The well-filled programs, though lengthy, suffered from no longueurs, so choosing highlights is difficult. But one of them was certainly Thursday’s performance of the two-part “Tabula Rasa,” among Mr. Pärt’s most familiar—and celebrated—works. It would be hard to imagine two violin soloists more putatively dissimilar than Midori and Mr. Aavik. But here they were, along with Mr. Järvi and his Festival Orchestra, in perfect sync, each urging the other toward greater virtuosity without the slightest trace of rivalry. Then, after a short silence, the music resumed, but now with the addition of Mr. Muhly on prepared piano, lending ineffable poignancy to strains of unsentimental emotionalism.
Not everything by Mr. Pärt is soothing. His “Credo” for chorus and orchestra, which capped the program proper on Thursday, recalls both Handel’s “Zadok the Priest,” the anthem traditionally associated with British coronations, and edgy mid-20th-century European modernism. Mr. Järvi led a scorching performance, with the orchestra and both choruses gratifyingly unconstrained.
The prepared piano, albeit without Mr. Muhly, returned in a crucial if less central role for the roughly half-hour “Te Deum,” which on Friday was crisply rendered with entirely Estonian forces led by Mr. Kaljuste. Mr. Pärt’s setting of the ancient text takes its place in a proud line that in the 19th century alone included Berlioz, Verdi and Bruckner. Mr. Pärt—using small female, male and mixed choirs and divided strings—makes the text hypnotic, a balm even, and on this occasion it proved a sublimely fitting end to programs whose throughline was solace.
Mr. Pärt has referred to music as “the handkerchief for drying my tears of sadness, the source of my tears of joy.” I’m not sure how many of his admirers would describe their connection to his work precisely that way. They might instead invoke traits like mystery, reserve, a sense of the infinite (writ small and large) and awe. The last of these in particular characterized the concerts Thursday and Friday, where both performers and audiences gave all they could to appreciating one of the most distinctive, and sincere, voices of our time.
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