The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is nothing short of a musical phenomenon. He can lay claim to being the most popular of contemporary composers.
Arvo Pärt is this week’s BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week. Donald Macleod presents the series, the first three episodes carry the titles The Soundtrack of an Age, The Soundworld of the Composer and Silence Is Like Fertile Soil.
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This Monday, 15 June 2015, Heinz Fischer, the president of the Republic of Austria, ceremonially presented the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art – which is the state’s highest decoration for remarkable services in this field of activity – to Arvo Pärt. The decoration has been awarded since 1955, and the fact that the number of its recipients is strictly limited, makes it special. There can be only 72 people wearing the decoration at the same time, half of which are Austrian citizens and half foreign nationals. Find out more on the website of the Arvo Pärt Centre. |
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Watch an excerpt from the concert that was held during the ceremony:
A special concert was dedicated to Arvo Pärt yesterday, 19 May, at the Konzerthaus Berlin.
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and conductor Tõnu Kaljuste performed a composer concert devoted to Arvo Pärt which was organized as part of Toomas Hendrik Ilves’ state visit to Germany in honour of the German President Joachim Gauck and First Lady Daniela Schadt.
Find out more on the website of Estonian Public Broadcasting.
Our latest newsletter is out now:Theatre magician Robert Wilson is paying homage to Arvo Pärt with the première of Adam’s Passion, which will be performed for the first time on 12 May in Tallinn.
For this project, the composer selected three major compositions from his oeuvre: the two choral works Adam’s Lament and Miserere, and the double violin concerto Tabula rasa. This is joined by Sequentia, a new work composed especially for Adam’s Passion.
Simultaneously, a television documentary is being filmed. You can watch a trailer on the website of accentus music:
Many of us have written about Pärt, but one thing was missing, the view from within the Orthodox Christian tradition that has guided Pärt's work since the 1970s. This has now been provided by Peter Bouteneff, writing with clarity, precision, and the graceful authority of one who knows what he is talking about. (Paul Hillier)
“Arvo Pärt – Out of Silence” by Peter Bouteneff was recently published by SVS Press. Find out more on the publisher’s website.
Painter and artist Satsuki Shibuya, who designed the cover of the book, has written a short blog entry about the publication which you can find here.
Estonia’s Classical Radio created a survey to find out which is the favourite Estonian classical album. 2,000 classical albums were available for voting, out of which 730 received votes. Four albums by Arvo Pärt made it on the top 10 Estonian classical albums as voted by the public, and even five albums were among the critics’ top 10.
The UK première of Arvo Pärt’s cantata Our Garden for children’s choir and orchestra takes place on 25 March at the St John’s Smith Square in London and will be sung by Forest School’s Boys’ and Girls’ Senior Chapel Choirs, accompanied by the School’s Chamber Orchestra.
Find out more on the websites of St John’s Smith Square and Forest School.
Fiona Maddocks of The Guardian has reviewed the Tallis Scholars’ “Arvo Pärt: Tintinnabuli”-CD, which was released earlier this month.
Liner notes and excerpts of the album’s 23 tracks are available on the official release page on Gimell.
Find out more on our #ArvoPart80 blog:
Arvo Pärt during rehearsals in Madrid with soprano Sylvia Schwartz and conductor John Storgårds
The Orquesta Nacional de Espana dedicates a retrospective to Arvo Pärt. The Spanish première of Swansong and a performance of Como cierva sedienta with Spanish soprano Sylvia Schwartz are among the highlights of the programme.
From 6 to 14 March, John Storgårds and Tõnu Kaljuste will conduct several orchestral works in Madrid, Arvo Pärt will be attending the festivities.
Texts live their independent lives and they wait for us: each person has their own time for finding those texts. These encounters occur when the texts are no longer considered as literature or works of art, but as anchors or models. (Arvo Pärt)
Last Friday the Arvo Pärt Centre presented its first book “In principio. The Word in Arvo Pärt’s Music” in the hall of Estonian Academy of Sciences.
The book brings together 81 texts of Arvo Pärt’s works, complete with English translations. The works have been arranged chronologically, encompassing Pärt’s work over almost 60 years.
Find out more about the book on the website of the Arvo Pärt Centre.
Photos from the presentation are available on the Centre’s Facebook page.
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It is with great pleasure that we present our tribute to Arvo Pärt in his 80th year. Tintinnabuli (from the Latin for ‘bell’) is the compositional style created by Arvo Pärt which informs every work on this recording. In all my searchings for inspiring contemporary music I have not come across anyone to rival him. (Peter Phillips) The Tallis Scholars’ “Arvo Pärt: Tintinnabuli”-CD will be released on 2 March 2015. The official release page is up and running: visit the website of Gimell to read the liner notes and listen to excerpts of the recording’s 23 tracks. |
Placing 38th in the overall most performed composers’ ranking of 2014, Arvo Pärt is the world’s most performed living composer for the fourth time in a row.
Find the 2014 Classical music statistics on bachtrack.
There’s also an infographic of 2014 available.
I feel that whenever I play Arvo Pärt’s music I do begin to go deeper within myself in order to try to create something of this spirituality that his music contains. So it’s almost as if you go inside yourself and you question who you are and how this music is bringing out different aspects.
The piece of music that I have almost the least to do is the Spiegel im Spiegel, but what I have to do is almost let go of myself. I think that being a vessel for this piece is a good way of describing it. (Tasmin Little)
In August 2011, BBC Radio 4 published a show exploring the impact of Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel on listener’s lives.
BBC Radio 4 has recently uploaded the full programme to SoundCloud, listen to it here:
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In 1984, ECM brought “a new sound into the musical world” with the release of Arvo Pärt’s “Tabula rasa”, the first album on the label’s New Series imprint which was subsequently rereleased as a special edition CD. Tyran Grillo has written a short text on the history of the series for Sequenza 21. The full text is available here. Follow our #ArvoPart80 blog. |
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